Metal Gates

Steel driveway gates, garden gates and alley gates, made to measure and fitted by the same fabricators who build the frames for our composite gates. Welded, powder coated, and built for one specific opening — including the bespoke one-offs that composite cannot do.

Every one of these was drawn, welded and fitted for that opening. See more of our work.

A metal gate is the frame without the infill

This is not a side-line bolted onto a composite business. Every composite gate we make is a welded steel frame carrying composite board, so the steelwork is the part we make either way.

The frame was always doing the work

Composite board has no structural job in a gate. It is infill. What carries the leaf, takes the leverage on the hinges and holds the gate square is the welded steel frame behind it. Take the board out and you have a metal gate, made in the same workshop by the people who were already making that part.

Which is why the specification does not change

Same frame sections, same welding, same powder coating, same hinge and post decisions. If you have read what we say about composite driveway gates, nearly all of it applies here unchanged — the opening is still measured post face to post face, the ground is still rarely level, and hollow piers are still hollow.

Where metal genuinely beats composite

A solid infilled gate is a sail. On an exposed frontage, a long coastal boundary or anywhere with a funnel between buildings, wind load on a solid leaf is a real force working on two hinges every day. A railed metal gate lets the wind through. That is not a style preference, it is the honest engineering answer on an exposed site, and it is the main reason we would steer someone towards metal.

What a metal gate can actually be

Railed and vertical bar

Uprights between a top and bottom rail, with or without a decorative head. Open, light, lets wind and daylight through, and shows the property behind it rather than hiding it. The usual choice where the gate is about defining and securing an entrance rather than screening it.

Solid infilled steel

Sheet steel rather than bars, for the same privacy a composite gate gives. Heavier than composite for the same leaf, and it carries the same wind load, so posts and hinges are specified up accordingly.

Acrylic and decorative infills

Panels set into the frame instead of bars — coloured acrylic, stained-glass effect, perforated or patterned sheet. This is the thing metal does that no other material we work with can, and it is how a gate ends up being the only one on the street.

Scrolls, spears and finials

The traditional wrought-iron vocabulary, made in steel. Scrolled top rails, spear heads, circles and quatrefoils, cast finials. On a Victorian or Edwardian frontage it is usually the only thing that looks right.

Bar spacing, children and dogs

Nobody asks about this until after the gate is in, and then it is expensive to change. It is worth two minutes at survey.

The gap that matters

We work to the same maximum gap used for balustrading — a 100mm sphere should not pass through — wherever a gate is on a family property. It is good practice rather than a legal requirement on a garden gate, but it is the number that exists because of small children and it costs nothing to build to.

Dogs are a separate question

A gap that stops a toddler will not stop a determined terrier, and a dog that can get its head through a gap can usually get the rest through. Where a gate is there to contain a small dog we either close the bar spacing or run a mesh or solid panel to the lower third, which also stops the gate being used as a ladder.

Climbability

A gate with a horizontal mid-rail is a ladder. Where security matters more than looks we leave the mid-rail out or set it low, and put the decorative work at the top where it does not give a foothold.

Finish — and the honest part about maintenance

This is where we will tell you something that argues against the page you are reading.

Powder coat over bare steel, or galvanise first

Powder coating is a finish, not a barrier. Applied straight onto bare steel it looks identical on day one to a gate that was hot-dip galvanised first, and behaves completely differently in year five. On coastal sites, anywhere salt gets used on the road, or any gate we expect to outlive us, galvanise first and powder coat over it.

Where rust actually starts

Almost never in the middle of a panel. It starts at cut edges, at weld seams where the coating is thinnest, at the bottom rail if it sits where water stands, and anywhere the coating has been chipped by a stone or a spade and left. Knowing those four places is most of what keeps a metal gate alive.

What you actually have to do

Wash it. Look at the bottom rail and the welds once a year. Touch in any chip before winter rather than after. It is perhaps twenty minutes a year, and skipping it for five years is what turns a repaint into a replacement.

And the comparison we are not going to dodge

Composite needs none of this. No painting, no touching in, nothing to rust. If the reason you are looking at metal is appearance or wind load, metal is the right answer and worth the upkeep. If it is because you assume metal lasts longer, that is worth a conversation before you order — a composite gate in a powder-coated frame will often outlast a metal one that nobody maintains.

The things only metal will do

Curves and shapes that are not rectangles

Composite board is straight. A frame can be bow-topped or arched, but the infill has to work with it. Steel bars can follow any curve you can draw, which is why genuinely arched, radiused and scrolled gates are metal.

Your house name or number in the gate

Cut, formed and welded into the top rail or the infill rather than screwed on afterwards. It is a small thing that makes a gate specific to one house.

One-offs

A coloured acrylic sunburst, a monogram, a pattern taken from something already on the building. These are drawn, agreed and made once. If you have something in mind, send a photograph or a sketch and we will tell you honestly whether it can be made and what it would cost.

What affects the cost

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

FAQs about metal gates

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