skylights & rooflights in verwood

From brickyards to housing estates in a few decades

Verwood's population grew several times over from the early 1970s, and the roofs show it.

Verwood's older story is written in clay. Local heathland clay went into earthenware for generations, and the brickworks at Ebblake made white and red bricks and drain pipes from clay dug on the site until about 1909. The Dorset Historic Environment Record describes a pottery kiln excavated at Ebblake in 1997, in use in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the last Verwood pottery, at Cross Roads, stopped production in 1952. Cottages in the older parts of the town can still show local brick, and their roofs belong to a different era from the ones around them.

The town grew slowly until the 1960s and then quickly. Census figures put the parish at about 3,510 people in 1971, and the Office for National Statistics estimate for mid-2022 is about 15,200. Most Verwood houses therefore date from the last half century: semis and detached houses on cul-de-sacs, a good number of bungalows and chalet bungalows, and newer estates at the edges. Older cottages and recent estates therefore sit side by side across the town.

Growth at that speed produced roofs built in several ways. A house from the 1960s or early 1970s may have a roof of individually cut rafters, with space to adjust a window position and trim a rafter if the design is signed off. A later house is more likely to have factory-made trusses, where cutting any member is a job for an engineer. Both are common here, sometimes on the same road. Because Verwood spans so many building periods, we never order for a roof we have not opened up and measured, and the survey sheet records which construction we found.

Bungalows in the town carry a different pattern from the two-storey estates. A single-storey plan from the 1970s or 1980s tends to put the bedrooms along one side and the living areas along the other, with a hallway or an inner bathroom in the middle that no outside wall reaches. In Verwood that middle strip is often the darkest part of the house, and the loft above it is the obvious route for daylight. Where the loft is deep enough, a boarded shaft under a roof window gives a wide, soft pool of light; where it is shallow, a short sun tunnel does the same job in a smaller footprint.

The belief that one estate means one roof is the most common mistake we hear in a town this size, and a survey finds otherwise.

An old brick house and an estate house, side by side

The two kinds of Verwood roof pose almost opposite problems.

Older brick cottages and houses in the town and around its edges are fewer than the estates, but they take the most care. Eaves are low, the timbers were cut to fit that one building, and the covering has often been replaced in sections over the years. Some older Verwood buildings may be listed, and for a listed house, listed building consent comes first. For an unlisted older house, a conservation rooflight with slender framing sits flatter against the tiles and is easier to defend if a neighbour or the council asks about the front slope.

Plenty of Verwood homes also have a flat-roofed addition: a kitchen extension on the back of a 1980s house, a garage turned into a playroom, a porch roof. Those take a flat rooflight on a kerb, since a roof window is made for a slope, and the survey records the existing covering, the fall and the height of the upstand available. A kitchen that has been extended to twice its depth can end up with a dim far end; a flat rooflight sited over the dining table fixes that without touching the garden doors.

Estate houses present the opposite difficulty. The roof is regular, the covering is recent and the structure is predictable, which makes measuring quick. The difficulty is the structure itself: a trussed roof allows little scope for a wide opening, and the loft may contain water tanks, pipework and a stair that dictate where a window can go.