Wooden Driveway Gates
in Farnham.

Farnham's wooden-gate market sits inside one of Surrey's most heritage-protected contexts. The Farnham Town Centre conservation area, designated 1970, covers the Georgian core; the Shepheard and Flock conservation area followed in 2020-2021. The town contains 388 listed buildings in the centre, 44 Grade II-starred, with a concentration of 17 Grade II-starred along Castle Street alone. Within any of these zones, a gate specification conversation with the Waverley conservation officer is mandatory before fabrication; outside them, the Surrey Hills AONB designation still applies to most of the surrounding parishes.

The Waverley approach to replacement gates on period property is that the new gate should be sympathetic to the architectural period rather than a pastiche of it. For Georgian Farnham property, that typically means a simple vertical-bar or framed-and-braced timber gate with minimal decorative work. Oak is specified more frequently here than in any other Surrey market, because the grain character reads correctly against the town's predominantly Georgian and Tudor-concealed-by-Georgian residential stock. Iroko is the practical alternative where budget or spans call for it. Accoya is rarely specified in central Farnham because the visual reference point is a two-hundred-year-old timber gate, not a high-tech modified one.