15.4 road miles east of Bournemouth
skylights & rooflights in milford-on-sea
Milford-on-Sea's conservation area takes in The Green, the High Street and All Saints Church, and the villas, cottages and bungalow roads round it, out to the lanes towards Keyhaven, are all measured by us on the roof.
roofs you find here in Milford
- Late Victorian villasTall two-storey houses with deep, steep roofs and attic rooms.
- Village and Keyhaven cottagesLow eaves, older timbers, rafters that are not regular.
- Postwar bungalowsShallow tiled roofs over a plan with a dark hall.
- Extended family housesRear additions with flat roofs that suit a rooflight.
the records we read for a Milford address
- planning authority
- New Forest District Council
- conservation area
- Milford and Keyhaven: check the address
- road miles
- 15.4
Nearby
since the late 1880s
a village that grew in layers
Milford-on-Sea is an old parish with a late Victorian expansion laid over it, and the two layers have different roofs, different timbers and different planning histories.
Old parish core, Victorian extension, later infill
The age of a Milford house points to how its roof was built.
The village you see today was built in stages. There is an older settlement round the church and the lanes that run towards Keyhaven, and there is the much larger spread of houses on the roads laid out for new building from the late 1880s, which filled over the following decades. The older cottages are low, with small rooms under the roof and timbers cut by hand. The Victorian houses are taller, with steeper pitches and, in many cases, rooms already built into the roof space.
That difference matters before any window is chosen. A cottage roof can have rafters that wander from one bay to the next, so a width that fits at one end of the slope may not fit at the other. A Victorian roof is more likely to have a regular run of rafters, but the loft floor beneath may carry a plaster ceiling, a chimney breast or a water tank that fixes where an opening can go. We find these things by climbing into the roof space with a tape and a torch, and they are all written on the survey sheet you receive.
The twentieth century filled the gaps between with bungalows and chalet bungalows, and more recently with extended family houses where a rear addition has left a flat roof over a kitchen or dining room. Each of those raises its own question. The bungalow wants light carried down into a hallway that has no window. The extension wants a rooflight set in a proper kerb, and a flat roof rooflight is the likely route there, with the kerb height and the fall measured before the unit is chosen.
Keyhaven, east of the village and within the same parish, folds into the same survey area for us. Its planning position differs, though: Keyhaven's conservation area falls mostly within the National Park boundary, which means the Park Authority handles planning for most Keyhaven addresses. The older cottages and the narrow lanes raise the same access questions as in Milford.
Hordle and Pennington lie close by, each with its own mix of bungalows and newer estates, and Lymington is a short drive along the main road, so a Milford visit often sits in the same day as a survey in one of those.
| House type | Typical roof | First measurement |
|---|---|---|
| Village cottage | Clay tile, hand-cut rafters | Rafter gap at each bay |
| Victorian villa | Steep pitch, slate or tile | Pitch and attic head height |
| Postwar bungalow | Shallow pitch, concrete tile | Void depth over the hall |
| Chalet bungalow | Rooms in roof, short slope | Sill height for escape |
| Extended house | Flat roof over rear room | Kerb height and fall |
Who handles planning, and how to look up your own street
Milford-on-Sea sits in Hampshire, and New Forest District Council is the planning authority for the address.
Milford-on-Sea has a conservation area taking in The Green, the High Street and All Saints Church, with its boundary last reviewed by New Forest District Council in 1999, so a good share of the village centre needs a boundary check before anything is added to a roof. The council publishes its conservation areas on its website. Boundaries can cut through the middle of a road, so search the full address and not just the street name.
The wider district also includes land inside the New Forest National Park, where the National Park Authority is the planning authority in place of the district council, and that includes most of Keyhaven and its own conservation area. Whether a particular address falls inside the park boundary is something to confirm on the park's map. We look at it during the survey and note what we find.
Living in a conservation area does not by itself take away permitted development for rooflights. An Article 4 direction over the street could, and so could a condition attached to the house's original permission, and both show up in the council's records. Listed buildings sit in their own category, where listed building consent is the deciding question for any new roof opening. The planning guide covers the rules in full.
Where the council asks for a low-profile rooflight on a road-facing slope, a conservation rooflight that sits close to the tile line is the usual answer. Rear slopes, out of view from the road, raise fewer questions. We follow the same order of checks, and you can follow it yourself before we visit.
Looking up a Milford-on-Sea address before you plan a rooflight
- Find the boundary mapOpen New Forest District Council's conservation area pages and search the exact address. A line on the map can pass between two neighbouring houses.
- Check the national park lineIf any part of the plot lies in the New Forest National Park, the National Park Authority handles the application, so the contact and the forms change.
- Search for listingHistoric England's online list of protected buildings takes an address search. If the house is on it, the listing takes in the roof along with the walls.
- Read the old decision noticesThe council's planning register shows past permissions for the property. An extension approved years ago can carry a condition that reaches the roof.
- Hand it to usAt the survey we check the same records and put what they showed in writing before we quote.
Attic rooms in tall houses and the stairwell below them
Many Milford houses already have rooms in the roof; the question is how much light reaches them and the stairs.
A tall Victorian house with an attic bedroom may have one small gable window and nothing else. A roof window in the rear slope can add a full wall of daylight, and the size depends on the rafters. Where rafters sit 600 mm apart centre to centre, roughly 550 mm of clear space is left between them, so a window 78 cm wide needs one rafter trimmed, and that brings in the structural rules. A VELUX roof window in a narrower code such as CK04, at 55 cm wide, comes close to that gap, so whether it goes in without cutting depends on the clearance measured at each bay.
Escape is the second check. Approved Document B only counts a roof window as an escape window where the floor of that storey is 4.5 m or less above ground level, so an attic bedroom in a tall villa has to be reached by a protected stair. Lower down, in a chalet bungalow, a correctly sized roof window may double as the way out. We measure the clear opening and the sill height to see whether the product you want can do that job.
The stairwell is the other dark space. A three-storey run of stairs in a villa gets its light from a landing window, if at all, and a roof window or lantern above the stairwell can lift the whole run. Where the loft above is a void and not a room, a sun tunnel is lighter work, though it brings in less light than a window does.
Roof windows also open, and an opening one, fitted high on the slope, at the top of a house helps move warm air out of the stairwell in summer. Building Regulations notification applies to a new opening or a full replacement; the Building Regulations guide lists what is notifiable.
A reading like this is written onto the survey sheet at the end of the visit, with a sketch of the rafter layout beside it, so the order and the quote both start from measured numbers. Nothing about the window size is left to be settled once the unit has arrived. One example reading comes from a Victorian rear slope. Every figure on it fits the others: the 78 cm window goes into a 550 mm gap only because one rafter is trimmed.
Keyhaven lanes, older cottages and the conservation question
Small roofs, long histories, and a few beliefs about what is allowed.
Keyhaven sits at the eastern edge of the parish, and the cottages there and in the older lanes have roofs that have been retiled and altered more than once, so their timbers rarely line up with plans. Where the timbers cannot be reached from inside, we raise some tiles during the survey and measure the rafters that are actually there. A window sized to a drawing can arrive too wide for the bay it was meant to fill.
Getting to the roof shapes the job here as heavily as the roof itself. A narrow lane may not take a delivery lorry, and a row of attached cottages may have no rear passage at all, so the unit has to be carried through the house. We note the route at the survey and plan the delivery to suit it, and where scaffold would have to stand on a public road we say so in the quote so a licence can be arranged first.
A small cottage room under the eaves has little wall to put a window in, which is why roof windows suit these houses so well: the light arrives from above and does not use up floor or wall space. A low ceiling also changes the arithmetic on sill height, because a window set too high leaves no view out. Sill height is one of the readings on the survey sheet for exactly that reason.
There is also a good deal of talk about what a conservation area allows, and some of it is wrong in both directions. One belief comes up more often than any other.
Myth
A conservation area means rooflights are not allowed.
Neighbours pass this on as a rule, and it stops some owners from asking the council at all. The opposite belief, that nothing needs checking anywhere, is just as common and just as unreliable.
Fact
The designation alone does not take the right away.
What removes permitted development is an Article 4 direction or a planning condition, and either is checked in the council's records. Where the street is covered, an application can still succeed, with a low-profile design on the less visible slope. The conservation rooflight page shows the styles councils ask for.
faq
questions from Milford owners
Is my house in the Milford-on-Sea conservation area?
Search the full address on New Forest District Council's conservation area map, since a boundary can pass between neighbours. We check it again before we quote and write down what the records show.
Do you cover Keyhaven as well as the village?
Yes. Keyhaven is part of the same survey area, but most of it sits within the Park boundary, where the Park Authority's records usually apply. We confirm which body covers the house before we quote.
Can a rooflight in our attic room count as a fire escape?
Where the bedroom is tucked under the slope of a bungalow or chalet, a roof window large enough and set at a sensible height may serve. Above a two-storey house the escape has to be a protected stair, so the height of the storey comes first.
We have a flat roof over our kitchen extension. Can that take a rooflight?
It is the simplest roof to open up, provided the structure under it can take the trimming. We measure the kerb height and the fall, and advise on Building Regulations notification for the work.