Sectional Garage Doors in Letchworth

We often think long and hard about redecorating the house or landscaping the garden, but how much time do we spend thinking about other jobs that may need attention around the house?

We yearn for luxury additions such as the latest hot tub or flat screen cinema television set up, yet how often do we miss things that stick out like a sore thumb to all who pass our properties?

Rotten fascia boards, old and broken roof tiles or shabby windows often get overlooked simply because so much money and energy goes into the interior or exterior living space. Garage doors are another major failing of many properties, peeling paint, dented or rusted doors or doors that fail to operate owing to seized mechanisms or bent hinges.

Considering that a car is often the second most expensive item people buy in their lifetime, many are left on the driveway because the garage doors are damaged and too much of a hassle to have repaired or replaced.

Well, ACE Garage Doors have a wide range of different garage door styles to suit all properties and all budgets. Better still, we also service and repair garage doors at very short notice, because we stock many spare parts for different door styles, so you will never have to worry about waiting weeks for a repair to be carried out.No longer will you need to leave your car on the driveway when you have a beautiful new garage door that opens and closes smoothly and quietly and often at the mere press of a button.

Some Letchworth history

Letchworth used to be one of the ancient parishes of Hertfordshire. The parish church of St Mary the Virgin was built in the 12th or 13th Century. The village was located along the road now called Letchworth Lane, stretching from St Marys and the adjoining the medieval manor house which is now Letchworth Hall Hotel, up to the crossroads of Letchworth Lane, Hitchin Road, Baldock Road and Spring Road, where there was a post office. Letchworth was a relatively small parish, having a population in 1801 of 67, rising to 96 by 1901.

In 1898, the social reformer Ebenezer Howard wrote a book entitled To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. This was later republished as Garden Cities of To-morrow, in which he advocated the construction of a new kind of town, summed up in his three magnets diagram as combining the advantages of cities and the countryside while eliminating their disadvantages. Industry would be kept separate from residential areas as such zoning was a new idea at the time and trees and open spaces would prevail everywhere. His ideas were scorned heavily in the press but popular with many, especially members of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Quakers in particularly.

Letchworth: The first garden city

According to the book the term garden city was derived from the image of a city being situated within a belt of open countryside, which could contribute to food production for the population, and not, as is commonly believed, to a principle that every house in the city should have a garden.

The concept outlined in the book is not simply one of urban planning, but also included a system of community management. For example, the Garden City project would be financed through a system that Howard called Rate-Rent, which combined financing for community services, hence rates and with a return for those who had invested in the development of the city, thus rent. The book also advocated a rudimentary form of competitive tendering, whereby the municipality would purchase services, such as water, fuel and waste disposal, from mostly local commercial providers. These systems were never fully implemented, in Letchworth, the first garden city, Welwyn Garden City, the second or any other similar garden city.

A competition was held to find a town design which could translate Howards ideas into reality, and September 1903 the company First Garden City Ltd was formed, Richard Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin were appointed architects, and six square miles of land outside Hitchin were purchased for building. In keeping with the ideals only one tree was felled during the entire initial construction phase of the town, and an area devoted to agriculture surrounding the town was included in the plan, giving rise to the first known green belt stretch of land.

New housing for Letchworth

In 1905, and again in 1907, the company held the Cheap Cottages Exhibitions, contests to build inexpensive housing, which attracted about 60,000 visitors and had a considerable effect on planning and urban design in the United Kingdom, pioneering and popularising such concepts as pre fabrication, the use of new building materials, and front and back gardens. The exhibitions were sponsored by the Daily Mail, and their popularity was significant in the development of that newspapers launching of the Ideal Home Exhibition, the first of which took place the year after the second Cheap Cottages Exhibition. In 1907 the Meeting House Howgills was built in the town for the Society of Friends.

A railway station was opened in 1903 a few hundred yards west of its current position and railway companies often ran excursions to the town, bringing people to look at the social experiment. Letchworths founding citizens, attracted by the promise of a better life, were often caricatured by outsiders as idealistic and otherworldly. John Betjeman in his poems Group Life: Letchworth and Huxley Hall painted Letchworth people as earnest health freaks.

Letchworth the temperence town

One example of this was the ban on selling alcohol in public premises. Although Letchworth did have a pub called the Skittles Inn, or as it became known, the pub with no beer which opened as early as 1907. Letchworth was a temperence town and many ridiculed the town and its lack of alcohol. Some were impressed at Letchworth and its founders attempts to create better lives for inhabitants, others attacked the town and locals who became a popular subject for cartoonists. George Orwell, referred to the town in his Road to Wigan Pier book as the place where every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature cure-quack, pacifist and feminist in England could be found.

Despite the ban it is not true to say that there were no pubs in Letchworth. Pubs that had existed from before the foundation of the Garden City continued, including the Three Horseshoes in Norton, The George IV on the borders with Baldock, and the Three Horseshoes and The Fox in Willian. These continued to operate and they do to this day, and benefited from the lack of alcohol to be had in the centre of the town, as did the pubs in neighbouring Hitchin and Baldock. New inns also sprang up on the borders of the town, one such example being the Wilbury Hotel which was just outside Letchworth.

The ban on alcohol was finally lifted after a referendum in 1958, which resulted in the Broadway Hotel becoming the first public house in the centre of the Garden City. Several other pubs have opened since 1958, but to this day the town centre has fewer than six pubs, this is quite a low number for a town the size of Letchworth. The lack of town centre pubs means that the centre of Letchworth remains quite peaceful during the evenings.

Industry in Letchworth

One of the most important industries to arrive in the town in the early years was a company that manufactured corsets. The Spirella Company began building a large factory in 1912, close to the middle of town and the railway station that opened the next year. The Spirella Building, completed in 1920, blends in despite its central position through being disguised as a large country house, complete with towers and a ballroom. During the Second World War, the factory was also involved in producing parachutes and decoding machinery. Because corsets fell out of fashion, the factory closed in the 1980s, and was eventually refurbished and converted into offices.

Another major employer in Letchworth was Shelvoke and Drewry, a manufacturer of dustcarts and fire engines which existed from 1922 until 1990. This company manufactured axles, brakes and Hands Trailers. Letchworth had a very diverse light industry, including Kryn & Lahy Steel Foundry, often a target for German bombers in World War II, the Irvines Airchutes Parachute Factory, J. M. Dent and Son, also known as The Aldine Press, Garden City Press.

The biggest employer was British Tabulating Machine Company, later merging with Powers-Samas to become International Computers and Tabulators and finally part of International Computers Limited. At one time the Tab as it was known had occupancy of over thirty factories in Icknield Way, Works Road and finally in Blackhorse Road. Blackhorse Road was built on what was the continuation of the original Icknield Way. Upon building the new building, evidence for extensive Neolithic and Iron Age occupation was found, the excavation being carried out by John Moss-Eccardt of Letchworth Museum and Art Gallery. Some of the artefacts are now on display in North Hertfordshire Museum. In the Second World War, a number of early computers were built in what became known as the ICL 1.1 plant.

Different styles of garage doors available in Letchworth

As ACE Garage Doors are based in Stevenage, we are not more than a few minutes away from Letchworth and have a long list of very satisfied customers in and around the town. Below are some of the styles of garage doors we supply and fit in the Letchworth area.

Sectional garage doors

Sectional garage doors are a really popular choice of garage door. They are popular as they do not require any room at the front of the garage for them to open or close. The more traditional up and over garage door will need some room at the front to allow the door to swing out and up, meaning sectional garage doors are better for the shorter driveway.

Sectional garage doors are manufactured from separate panel sections that are connected with hinges. As the door opens and closes, wheels at the edge of each panel roll inside a vertical track on each side of the door opening. The operation of sectional garage doors is effortless, smooth and quiet.

The hinges that are hidden between each panel section move over a curved section of the track, this means that the door will sit parallel to the ceiling when it is completely open and in line with the walls when completely closed. Because they come to rest along the garage ceiling when opened, storage shelves and units will have to be situated slightly lower on the side walls of the garage, but at the furthest end of the garage, ceiling and wall storage is not affected at all.

A pair of very high tension springs above the door opening are attached to cables that operate the door and these prevent it from slipping down when the garage door is only partially open.

Sectional garage doors are often manufactured from steel panels, but they can also be made from timber or other composite materials that are extremely tough, have very low maintenance requirements and may even include window inserts of various designs. ACE Garage Doors offer a wide choice of hardware, textures, and colours with their range of sectional garage doors. They come in both insulated and non insulated models and the insulated version is perfect for properties that have integral garages.

Roller shutter garage doors

When people think about roller shutters, they immediately think about retail premises or industrial units. However, roller shutter garage doors are not just for these commercial applications, they are perfect for domestic use too. The roller shutter garage doors that we supply and fit are very modern looking and very secure.

One of the major benefits of roller shutter garage doors is that virtually the entire ceiling space can be used for storage. Apart from a small area at the front of the garage where the shutter rools up, the rest of the ceiling space remains clear. The roller shutter mechanism is reliable, smooth and very quiet to open and close. And with neat little remote control and wall mounted units available, this operation is available at the mere press of a button.

Side hinged garage doors

Side hinged garage doors are frequently fitted to separate garages that are situated away from the house. They may also be manufactured from high quality timber are often referred to as a barn door style of garage door. Side hinged garage doors are certainly a more traditional design and although usually made from timber, they can be manufactured from other materials too, so the choices are wide.

Side hinged garage doors swing open and closed from a hinged frame on either side of the opening like any other traditional type of door. Owing to the weight, they will have very robust hardware fitted to cope with the extra stress.

Side opening garage doors are particularly suited to garages with pitched and tiled roofs that are built from brick or block. Side hinged garage doors can even be automated with special conversion arms to make your life even easier.

Up and over or canopy garage doors

The up and over garage door is the style of door that is probably the most common one used on garages today. Up and over garage doors do not have separate sections like roller shutters or sectional garage doors, they are made of one solid piece of material, most commonly metal. They have a pivoting hinge mechanism, so they can swing outwards and then tilt up into the garage ceiling space. The up and over style of garage door sits parallel to the garage ceiling and extends past the front of the garage when the door is open, so you will need to ensure your car is far enough away from the door to allow it to open and close without any obstruction.

Repairs and servicing of garage doors

Please remember that ACE Garage Doors are always available to service and repair your garage doors at very short notice. As we are based only a few miles from Letchworth, we can be with you very quickly indeed.

So if you want to improve the look of your property with a new garage door and would like the benefits of a modern automated system, call ACE Garage Doors today.