Daylight and sunlight report in Lewisham

Housing stock and what it means for light

Lewisham is a borough of terraces and conversions: 42.2 per cent of households live in a house or bungalow, and 41.9 per cent of households own their home. Many terraces here were split into flats, so a rear extension often sits beside a neighbour's ground-floor and upper-floor windows belonging to different households.

That matters because the BRE tests are applied to each habitable room. A kitchen that is the only source of light for a lower-ground flat is judged differently from a bedroom with two windows. Our survey records which room each window serves, using what we can see from your side and what the neighbour's own plans and listings show.

The council's published guidance on alterations and extensions, the Alterations and Extensions SPD, is where officers look first for depth and height limits. We test the shape that guidance allows, and report any case where a design within the guidance still takes meaningful light.

Constraints we check before we model

Lewisham has 30 conservation areas and 57 Article 4 directions. Where a direction removes permitted development rights you need a planning application, and the validation list then applies in full.

Historic England lists 367 entries within the borough. None of this changes the light tests, but it sets how much freedom the design has to respond when the result is poor. A listed house will not accept a wholesale change of roof shape just to improve a window's score, so we look for gentler fixes.

How Lewisham decides householder and small schemes

The council took 578 householder decisions in the latest published year, granting 89.4 per cent, and 95.2 per cent of those were decided on time. Minor schemes of one to nine homes were granted at 83.7 per cent across 534 decisions.

Those figures describe applications that arrived complete. A report that arrives with the application, with each affected window named and the findings explained, removes one of the common reasons an application is chased for more information. We can also take the report to the officer if the result needs explaining, and our planning drawings for Lewisham are built from the same model.

What you receive

A written report with the three-dimensional model views, the list of tested windows and rooms, the results before and after, and a conclusion in plain English. We cover daylight at the window face, light distribution inside the room, sunlight for windows within the orientation limit, and the overshadowing of gardens and amenity space that the checklist names.

Where a window falls outside the guideline we say so, and we explain whether the context supports it. London policy asks for appropriate light in context and the guide itself is advisory, so a well-argued report can still support an application with a few modest shortfalls. A second chartered technologist checks the geometry and results before issue.

If the numbers show a problem, we try the obvious options on the model: a lower eaves, a narrower depth, a hipped corner. You see the improvement for each before you decide.

Cost and how to start

The report is quoted individually, since the work depends on how many windows lie within range and how awkward the site is. The fixed fee covers the model, the tests and the written report. Send an address and a sketch and we will tell you which part of the checklist applies.

The daylight and sunlight service page explains the method in full, and our architectural drawings page for Lewisham lists everything else we draw in the borough. Neighbouring councils write their own rules: see Greenwich and Southwark.