Glass specialists serving Steyning

Working within Steyning's conservation area

Steyning's High Street and the streets running off it are a conservation area, and a large number of individual buildings are listed in their own right. That changes what is possible with glass, and it is worth understanding before you get quotes from anyone.

Replacing original windows in a listed building requires listed building consent, and it is frequently refused where the existing windows are original. Carrying out that work without consent is a criminal offence rather than a planning technicality, and it has a habit of surfacing during conveyancing years later. Anyone offering to swap your original casements for double glazing without mentioning consent is not doing you a favour.

The workable route is nearly always secondary glazing. It sits internally, leaves the external appearance untouched, and is fully reversible, which is the word conservation officers care about most. We can supply drawings and product detail for a consent application, and we have dealt with Horsham District Council's conservation team on Steyning jobs before.

Leaded lights and period glass

The other strand of Steyning work is restoration rather than replacement. Leaded panels deform over decades: the lead creeps, the panel bows outwards, and eventually the cames fail and panes drop out. A bowed panel can usually be taken out, flattened, re-leaded and re-cemented rather than remade, which keeps the original glass in the building.

Where individual panes have cracked, we match rather than substitute. Modern float glass in an eighteenth-century window is instantly visible because it is optically perfect and the original is not. We keep salvaged and reproduction period glass for exactly this, and on a good repair you should not be able to pick out which pane we replaced.