Quality Street Furniture for UK Spaces

What sits in this category

Street furniture covers the fixed items that equip a public or commercial outdoor space. The range divides into a few clear groups:

• Cycle parking and shelters - cycle stands, racks, and shelters and canopies, including secure compounds.
• Access control - bollards in fixed, removable and ornamental forms, and parking posts.
• Seating - benches and picnic tables.
• Waste - outdoor litter bins and grit bins.
• Shelter - smoking shelters, waiting shelters and canopies.
• Protection - impact protection railings and guards for columns, walls and building edges.

Specify the fixing before the product

Street furniture fails at the ground far more often than it fails as a product, and the fixing choice is usually made too late.

Root fixed items are concreted into the ground and resist being levered, pushed or driven at. This is the specification for anything unsupervised, anything near vehicles, and anything worth stealing.

Bolt down items fix to existing hard standing through a flanged base. Faster, no excavation, removable and repositionable. It depends entirely on what is under the bolts: a thin or failing slab becomes the weak point.

Find out what is beneath the proposed position before ordering. Services, a soft edge, a thin overlay or a structural deck all change the answer, and they change it after delivery if nobody checked.

Finish decides the life

Almost everything outdoors should be hot-dip galvanised before it is coated. Galvanising puts zinc right through the surface, including inside tube sections, so corrosion does not start from the inside and work outward. Powder coating alone looks identical on day one and is an indoor specification.

Stainless steel suits prominent locations where appearance carries as much weight as durability. Timber needs a maintenance plan, and recycled plastic profiles avoid that at the cost of a different look.

Permissions and placement

Installing on the public highway or in a public space usually needs the highway authority's agreement, and larger or permanent structures can need planning consent. Assessment normally turns on pedestrian flow, sightlines, accessibility and maintenance access.

Leave clear width past every item. A bench, bin or stand that narrows a footway below a usable width creates an obstruction, particularly for wheelchair users and people with prams, and that is the objection that most often stops a scheme after installation rather than before.