Composite Driveway Gates

A driveway gate is the one thing on the front of a house that has to work every day and be looked at from the road. We measure the opening, build the gate to those measurements, and fit it — composite panels in a welded steel frame, powder coated, made for one specific gap rather than cut down from a stock size.

Every one of these was measured on site and built for that opening. See more of our work.

Start with the opening, not the gate

Almost every decision below follows from three measurements taken on site. It is why we survey rather than quote from a photograph, and why a width given over the phone is only ever a starting point.

The measurement that matters is post face to post face

Not the width of the drive, and not the gap between the kerbs. It is the clear distance between the two faces the gate will hang from, taken at the top and again at the bottom, because brick piers are rarely parallel. On an older property a 20mm difference top to bottom is common and it changes how the gate is built, not how it is fitted.

Which way it opens decides what you can have

A gate that swings inward needs a flat, clear run the depth of the gate leaf — half the opening width for a pair. If the drive rises away from the road, that run is not flat and the gate will ground before it is fully open. Outward-opening gates avoid that but cannot overhang a public footway, which rules them out on most terraced and many semi-detached frontages.

The ground is almost never level

Fall across an opening is normal, and it is the single most common reason a gate looks wrong after fitting. Where the drive falls away from one pier to the other, the gate is built square and the ground clearance set to the high point, or the bottom rail is raked to follow the fall. The first keeps the gate looking level and leaves a wider gap at one end; the second closes the gap and makes the gate look slightly out of square from an angle. It is a choice, and it is better made at survey than discovered on fitting day.

Hung, sliding or cantilever

Four arrangements cover nearly every driveway. The right one is usually decided by the opening width and how much level ground sits behind it.

A pair of hung gates

The default, and the right answer for most openings between 2.4m and 4.5m. Each leaf is half the opening, so the swing space needed is modest and the gates can be opened one at a time for a pedestrian. Above about 4.5m the leaves get heavy enough that hinge and post specification starts to matter more than the gate itself.

A single hung gate

Suited to narrower openings, roughly under 3m, and to drives where there is space to swing one long leaf but not two. It puts all the weight on one pier, so the fixing side needs to be the solid one — which is not always the side a customer expects.

Sliding on a track

The gate runs on a ground track and rollers, parallel to the boundary. It needs a clear run alongside the opening at least as long as the gate, and it needs the ground along that run to be level and to stay clear — a sliding gate stops working the moment the track fills with gravel or leaves. Where it wins is a drive with no room to swing, or one that slopes up steeply from the road.

Cantilever

A sliding gate carried on a counterbalance rather than a ground track, so nothing crosses the opening. It costs more and needs a longer run alongside — roughly one and a half times the opening — but it is the answer on uneven or sloping ground where a track would never sit true, and on drives that have to stay clear for drainage.

What the gate is actually made of

A welded steel frame, not a composite one

The structure is steel, welded and powder coated. The composite is infill, held in the frame. That matters because a driveway gate is a large sail with a lot of leverage on two hinges, and composite board on its own will not carry that. It also means the frame colour and the panel colour are two separate decisions.

The panels

Wood-effect composite board, either smooth or embossed with a grain. It does not need painting, staining or treating, and it does not swell and bind in wet weather the way a timber gate does in its first winter. It will mark like anything else and it washes down.

Colours, and what people actually choose

Anthracite grey is the default and the vast majority of what goes out. Charcoal for something closer to black. Walnut and chocolate for the browns. Light ash and light oak at the pale end, and light grey for the band between anthracite and light ash. Black, when it is mentioned, almost always means the powder-coated metalwork rather than the panels.

Posts and fixings — where gates actually fail

A gate that drops or binds a year after fitting has almost never failed at the gate. It has failed at what it is hung on.

Brick and stone piers

A pier that looks solid is not automatically a fixing point. Many are a single skin built around a hollow core, or capped decoratively with nothing structural behind the face. Where the pier will take it, hinges are resin-anchored rather than hammered in, and on soft stone the load is put on slowly. Where it will not, the gate goes on independent posts set alongside and the pier is left to look like a pier.

Independent posts

Concreted in, sized to the gate rather than to a standard. This is the honest answer far more often than customers expect, and it is not a compromise — it is the difference between a gate that still shuts squarely in five years and one that does not.

Hinges carry more than the weight

A driveway gate leaf exerts leverage, not just load. Adjustable hinges are worth specifying anywhere the ground is known to move — coastal plots, clay that shrinks in summer, anything on made ground — because they let a gate be brought back to square in a few minutes rather than by lifting the posts.

Built ready for automation, whether or not you automate

The decision you cannot easily reverse

Automation can be added later. What cannot easily be added later is the ducting under a finished driveway and the post specification to take a motor. If there is any chance of automating, it costs very little to build for it now and a great deal to retrofit through a block-paved drive afterwards.

What we build in

Conduit run under the drive before it is made good, posts sized for the additional load, and a drop bolt and slam plate positioned so they do not foul a future motor. The gate then works perfectly well by hand and stays a straightforward job for an installer later.

We do not push automation

Most driveway gates we fit are manual and stay that way. If you do want gates automated, electric gates is the page for it, and it is a different conversation about safety edges, force testing and power.

What affects the cost

Gate prices move on a handful of variables rather than a fixed rate. The main ones are:

FAQs about composite driveway gates

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