Lucarne

This general meaning is also preserved in British use, particularly for small windows into unoccupied attic or spire spaces.

[2] In industrial architecture a lucarne or lucam[citation needed] is a feature of warehouses, mills, factories or the like in which a window, opening or housing high up on an exterior wall supports a hoist above doors on the floors below.

[3] The simplest lucarne is no more than the extension of a roof beyond a gable wall, with a ridge timber strong enough to support a hoist.

A gin wheel on this beam can provide a simple rope hoist, sufficient to lift a sack of grain.

These doors sometimes have an iron fold-down flap outside them, as a short loading step, giving clearance for the hoist away from the wall.

Two riverside mill buildings, each with prominent wooden lucarnes cantilevered beyond their wall above the river, supported by diagonal struts
Camden Malthouse (left) and Camden Mill (1880) beyond, Bath [ 1 ]
An early warehouse building, with loading doorways on three floors and a simple lucarne above formed merely by the roof projecting beyond the wall and supporting a single pulley
College Hill, Shrewsbury
A large and complex reinforced concrete building with brick facing. Three large two-storey lucarnes in bare concrete extend from the wall above the harbour wharf.
The WCA warehouse on Redcliffe Wharf in Bristol [ i ]
A red brick warehouse on four floors, now converted as flats. The loading doorways were slightly inset into the wall and now have protruding glazed balconies added.
Warehouse in Worcester converted to flats, 2006
Converted dock warehouse in buff brick with a prominent parapet. A gap is visible in the parapet above the column of loading doorways, where a lucarne has been removed. The doorways also have hinged iron flaps, restrained by chains, as loading extensions.
Ivory House, St Katharine Docks , London (1830).
Note the traces of the removed lucarne above the loading doorways, and the resulting gap in the parapet.