Everything You Need Before You Buy.
Four essential guides covering UK planning permissions, precise measuring, foundation requirements, and how to care for your structure across every season.
Four guides covering the decisions worth making before you order a pergola. Each one is written for the questions people actually ask us, and each has its own page so you can go straight to the one you need.
A lot of people start out searching for pergola ideas, and what comes back is photographs. Photographs are a fair start. They just do not settle the four things these guides do: where a structure is allowed to go, what size the garden will actually take, what the ground underneath has to do, and how it is kept afterwards.
The four guides
- Planning & Permission — Where a pergola usually sits within permitted development, what tightens the rules, and when to get the position checked before you commit to a size.
- Measuring — How to measure the space you actually have — furniture, door swings, downpipes, eaves height — so the structure you order fits the garden you own.
- Foundations — What the ground under a pergola has to do, and how to tell whether what you already have is suitable before delivery day.
- Maintenance — Keeping an aluminium pergola in good order through a British year, and the handful of things not to do to it.
If you have not settled on a size yet, read Measuring first — it decides most of the rest. If the position is near a boundary, read Planning & Permission before you measure.
See the Engineering In Person.
Our single full-size show pergola is at our Sutton, Retford premises, and viewings are by appointment. Book a viewing on the showroom page, where you can send the dates and times that suit you. Or use the form below to send approximate sizes and photographs. We aim to return an initial budget estimate within a few working days; if it suits your budget, we then move to the detailed specification, CAD drawings and firm written quotation.