Areas We Cover

Severn Skylights Gloucester works from the city outwards, thirty miles by road in every direction the roads actually go. That is a deliberately awkward way to describe a service area, and it is the honest one: the Severn cuts through the middle of it, the Cotswold escarpment stands along the eastern edge, and the difference between thirty miles on a map and thirty miles behind a van is considerable in both directions. What follows is what that radius really reaches, why the roofs inside it vary more than almost any comparable area in England, and how the pages below are arranged.

What thirty miles by road actually reaches

Measured by road rather than across country, the radius pulls a long way north and south along the M5 and considerably less to the west, because the river has to be crossed at a bridge. North it takes in Tewkesbury and the vale villages, Ledbury and the Malverns. South it runs down past Stonehouse and Dursley to Thornbury, Yate and Chipping Sodbury on the Bristol fringe. East it climbs the escarpment on the A417 and the A40 to Cirencester, Northleach, Stow, Moreton and the wool towns beyond. West it crosses the Severn into the Forest of Dean, then over the Wye to Monmouth and down to Chepstow.

Cheltenham, Gloucester’s suburbs and the Stroud valleys sit close in and account for a large share of the work simply because that is where most of the housing is. The far edges are reached less often and are reached properly when they are: a job in Chipping Campden or Lechlade is planned around the travel rather than squeezed between two others, because a crew arriving late is a crew that finishes the outside work in the dark, and nothing here is ever left open overnight.

Four counties, and one of them is in Wales

Most of the radius is Gloucestershire and it is worth being plain that not all of it is. Ross-on-Wye and Ledbury are Herefordshire. Malvern is Worcestershire. Thornbury, Yate and Chipping Sodbury are South Gloucestershire, a separate unitary authority from the county. Monmouth and Chepstow are Monmouthshire, which is in Wales.

That matters more than a line on a map usually does, because the two permissions a rooflight can need are both administered locally. Planning and conservation sit with whichever authority covers the address, and their conservation officers have their own settled views on what is acceptable on a visible slope. Building control notification also follows the address, and in Wales the national guidance documents behind it are made separately from the English ones and differ in points of detail. None of that changes the work on the roof. It changes who the paperwork goes to and how long it takes, and it is established at survey rather than discovered later. The notification is handled as part of the job wherever the address falls.

Why the roof stock changes so much inside one radius

Before cheap transport, a house was built from whatever was within a cart’s journey of it. The radius around Gloucester happens to cross three quite different geologies in about forty minutes of driving: oolitic limestone along the Cotswold escarpment and the wolds behind it, the alluvial clay of the Severn Vale, and the old red sandstone and coal measures of the Forest of Dean. Every one of them produced a different building stone, a different roof covering and a different pitch, and every one of those still sits on the roofs today.

Then the twentieth century laid two further layers over the top: interwar and post-war suburbs in hipped concrete tile, and modern estates in trussed rafter construction with a very different structural rulebook. The result is that the same rooflight, ordered from the same manufacturer on the same day, is a genuinely different job in Painswick and in Quedgeley. This is the reason there are pages by place at all, rather than one page saying the company covers Gloucestershire.

The ground, the covering, and what it does to an opening

Access, and the corner of the county where it is the biggest line

In most of the radius, getting to the work is unremarkable: a driveway, a level garden, a tower or a modest scaffold, material carried a short distance. In the valleys around Stroud, Chalford, Rodborough and Nailsworth it is the single largest variable in the job. Houses are cut into the bank, so a cottage is one storey at the front and three at the back. Access runs by shared lane, footpath or a flight of steps. Retaining walls sit hard against the elevation and there is nowhere flat to stand a tower.

Said plainly: scaffold sometimes has to be hand-carried a long way, and a lantern’s glass may need extra hands or a mechanical lift where no lorry can get within reach. That takes longer and it costs more, and it is priced from the survey with the access looked at properly so the figure holds when the crew arrives. The compensation is that these are the houses where a rooflight does the most good, because a cottage with a bank behind it and neighbours tight on both sides has no elevation left to put a window in.

How the pages below are arranged

The places are grouped by the ground they stand on rather than alphabetically, and the groups run outward from the city: Gloucester’s own localities first, then Cheltenham, then the valleys, the vale, the wolds, the Forest, and finally the towns over the county and national borders. Each page describes the roofs actually found in that place, the structural pattern underneath them, the local consent position and the access.

Villages are covered by the town page nearest them, because geology does not stop at a parish boundary. A cottage between Bibury and Northleach has the same stone slate, the same diminishing courses and the same reclaimed material question as either of them. A house on the lanes between Quedgeley and Hardwicke has the same trussed roof as the estate it sits beside. If your own address is not the name at the top of a page, the page for the nearest town describes your roof accurately, and an email with a photograph settles the rest.

What is the same at every address

The county changes the method and it does not change the standards. Every job is surveyed before a fixed price is given, and the survey is where the covering is properly identified, the structure looked at from inside the void, and the access measured. Any structural trimming is designed before a rafter is cut. The perimeter is detailed to the same specification whether the covering is stone slate or concrete tile: upstand height taken from the finished surface, falls that shed, flashing laps run with the flow and fixed at the head, underlay dressed rather than slit around the frame. The Building Control notification is handled as part of the job. The roof is never left open overnight, anywhere. And the workmanship carries a ten-year guarantee across the whole radius, not just the easy half of it.

To start anywhere inside it, email info@severnskylightsgloucester.co.uk with a photograph of the roof, a photograph of the room and the address. The costs page explains what comes back and in what order, and the guides cover the technical questions in depth.