About John the Gate Man

John the Gate Man is a gate specialist based at House Farm, Leyland, Lancashire, working across Lancashire and the South Lakes. The work covers four things and nothing else: automating gates that are already in place, supplying and fitting new gates, servicing automatic gates so they keep working safely, and repairing them when they fail. Domestic driveways and commercial entrances both.

Driveway gates fall awkwardly between the trades, which is the reason a specialist is worth having. A fencer will hang a gate but not wire it. An electrician will wire a drive but not set the hinges. A general builder will attempt both and the gate will be catching on the ground within a season. Almost every early gate failure traces back to that join: posts sized for a light manual leaf that were never going to carry a motor, gates hung out of level so the drive fights them from day one, or a cable run put in as an afterthought once the drive was already surfaced. Treating the gates, the posts, the ducting and the automation as one system is the whole difference.

The service area runs from Leyland out across the Lancashire plain to Preston, Chorley, Southport, Ormskirk, Wigan and Skelmersdale, north east through Blackburn, Accrington, Burnley, Clitheroe, Longridge and Garstang, up the coast to Lancaster and Morecambe, and on into the South Lakes at Kendal, Windermere, Ambleside, Ulverston and Barrow-in-Furness. That is a genuinely varied set of entrances: red brick suburban driveways, rural farm accesses on gravel and hardcore, and exposed stone pillared entrances in the Lakes where wind loading on a solid gate is a real design constraint rather than a footnote.

The part of this trade that gets least attention is the legal one. A powered gate is classed as machinery, not as fencing. Whoever installs one has to assess the risks it creates, fit safety devices suited to those risks, force test it against BS EN 12453 so the closing force cannot trap or crush, and issue a declaration of conformity. Once the gate is in use, the duty to keep it safe passes to the owner or occupier, and on commercial sites and blocks of flats to the business, landlord or managing agent. A very large number of gates on driveways today predate anyone taking that seriously, or have quietly lost their protection since, because photocells drift out of alignment and safety edges perish without the gate behaving any differently.

There is no sales process here worth describing. Call 07768 314082, describe what the gate is doing or what you want it to do, and the job gets looked at. Anything beyond the simplest work needs seeing before a figure can be put to it, because the gate, the posts, the ground surface and the distance to the nearest power supply all change what is involved.