Shower screens in London, measured for your bathroom

Choosing shower screens in London: the decisions that actually matter

Shower screens in London are rarely a catalogue purchase, and that has nothing to do with taste. A boxed enclosure is made on the assumption that your opening is square, plumb and level. Almost no London bathroom provides one. Before you start comparing hardware finishes or arguing about 8mm against 10mm glass, there are four or five decisions that will quietly settle whether the finished shower looks sharp and stays dry, or whether you spend the next two years wiping a channel full of limescale and topping up silicone.

The biggest of those decisions is not the price and it is not the finish. It is when the screen gets measured.

When should a shower screen be measured?

After tiling. After the tray is bedded or the wet room floor is formed and screeded, after the walls behind the shower are in their final finished state, and before anyone has started talking about delivery dates. A made to measure shower screen is made to the opening that exists on the day it is templated, not the opening on a drawing. Tile thickness varies enormously. A 10mm porcelain on a bed of adhesive over render takes a different amount out of an opening than a thin ceramic laid tight to board. Cut the glass first and tile afterwards and you have a panel that no longer fits.

That matters more with glass than with almost anything else in a bathroom, because toughened glass cannot be altered once it is made. Every cut, notch, drilled hole and polished edge happens while the glass is still annealed. Then it goes through the toughening furnace, and after that it is finished for good. Not a millimetre off the height, not a new hinge cut-out, not one extra hole for a handle. Try to grind a toughened panel and it will either chip badly or shatter into the familiar heap of small pieces. If the measurement is wrong, the panel is scrap and the lead time starts again.

There is a sensible way to sequence it. We come out early, while the walls are still open, to agree the layout: where the tray sits, which way the door swings, where a support bar would land, how high the mixer and any niche or shelf will be so the glass does not foul them, and whether the stud behind the hinge side needs timber in it. Then we come back after tiling to template the real opening. The first visit is free and it is where the expensive mistakes get caught. The second visit is where the glass is actually decided.

If a supplier offers to make your screen from the dimensions on your plan, they are moving their risk onto you. Glass made to a drawing fits a drawing.

Tanking, falls, and the part of the job a glass fitter cannot own

A shower screen is not a waterproofing product. It is a splash control product. The waterproofing is the tanking behind the tiles: a liquid membrane or a bonded sheet system over suitable boards, with the internal corners, the floor to wall junction and the pipe penetrations taped or banded so water that gets through a grout line has nowhere to go. If that layer is missing or badly lapped, water will travel behind the tiles and come out in the room below eventually, and no screen in the world will stop it.

We will tell you honestly if the substrate looks wrong, if we can see plasterboard where a tile backer board should be, or if the tray has been bedded on dabs with voids under it. What we cannot do is take responsibility for water that got behind the tiles. Our responsibility starts at the finished surface and ends at the silicone line, and we would rather say that plainly up front than argue about it later.

Falls are the other thing people get wrong. Put a level on a tray before any glass goes near it. A tray should fall to its waste, and the floor outside the enclosure should not fall towards the screen. On a wet room, the former needs to pull water to the drain from every direction, including from under the glass. If the tiled floor slopes out of the shower and across the line of the panel, water crosses the silicone joint by gravity and nothing about the glass will change that. It is cheap to check with a spirit level and a jug of water, and it is painful to discover after the tiling is grouted.

What London hard water actually does to glass

London sits on chalk, and the water that comes out of the tap carries dissolved calcium and magnesium salts. When a droplet dries on a glass panel the water leaves and the mineral stays behind. In the first weeks that deposit sits on the surface and a cloth takes it off. Left to build up through hundreds of wet and dry cycles, and helped along by alkaline soap residue, it bonds to the glass and begins to attack the surface itself.

That is the part people do not expect. Glass is not chemically inert. Prolonged contact with alkaline deposits leaches the surface and leaves microscopic pitting, so what started as a wipeable film becomes a permanently cloudy, slightly rough panel. At that stage you are no longer cleaning, you are polishing, and heavy etching does not come back. New glass is often cheaper than specialist restoration, which is a miserable thing to have to tell someone about a screen that is three years old.

An easy-clean coating helps, and it is worth having, but understand what it is. It is a treatment bonded to the glass on the processing line that fills the microscopic surface pores and makes the face water repellent, so droplets bead and run rather than spreading and drying in place. It reduces how much mineral is left behind and makes what is left easier to shift. It is not a shield, it does not last forever, and it cannot be brushed on later over an installed panel with any real effect. The spray-on versions sold as a retrofit wear off within weeks.

The routine that actually keeps glass clear in London is short and boring, and it is more effective than any product:

• Keep a squeegee or a microfibre cloth in the shower and take the water off the glass before you leave the room. Twenty seconds, every time. This single habit does more than everything else combined.
• Once a week, wipe the panel and the hardware down with warm water and a soft cloth to lift soap residue, then dry it.
• If a film has started to form, a mild acidic cleaner or diluted white vinegar will take early limescale off uncoated glass. Keep strong acids and anything abrasive away from coated glass, polished edges and brushed finishes.
• Never use a scouring pad, a blade or a bathroom cream cleaner on glass. They scratch, and scratches hold scale.
• Leave the door or panel open after use so the enclosure dries instead of staying humid.

Silicone is a five-minute job that decides whether the screen leaks

Use a neutral cure silicone, not a cheap acetoxy one. Acetoxy sealants cure by releasing acetic acid, which is the vinegar smell you get from a budget tube. They are more aggressive to some metals and mirror backing, less kind to natural stone, and in our experience they go mouldy and lift sooner in a hot, constantly wet enclosure. A neutral cure sanitary grade silicone costs a little more per tube and behaves better for years.

Where the bead goes matters just as much as what is in the tube. The glass to tray joint gets sealed on the outside, the dry face. The inside stays open so that any water that works into the gap drains back into the tray where it belongs. Seal both faces and you have built a sealed reservoir. Water still gets in, it has nowhere to go, and eventually it finds the weakest point, which is usually the outside bead, and comes out into the room. Then somebody adds more silicone and the problem gets worse.

Wall profiles and hinge plates are sealed behind, against the tile, before they are fixed, so the fixing holes are protected. A tidy thin bead on the visible face is cosmetic. The bead that does the work is the one you never see.

Glass thickness, panel size and hinge choice are one decision, not three

Toughened glass weighs around 2.5kg per square metre for every millimetre of thickness, so an 8mm panel is roughly 20kg per square metre and a 10mm panel about 25kg. A 900mm by 2000mm door in 10mm is therefore a serious object, close to 45kg before hardware. That weight has to be carried by the hinges, and the hinges have to be carried by the wall.

Thicker glass is stiffer, and stiffness is what stops a tall panel flexing when you lean on it or push the door shut. For most fixed panels and bath screens, 8mm is entirely adequate and we will say so rather than upsell you. Once a door gets tall, or a walk-in panel gets wide, or you want the look of hinges with no top rail at all, 10mm earns its place because it deflects less and hangs straighter. A wide 8mm panel with no support bar will visibly bow, and once it bows the door stops lining up.

Hinge choice follows from that. Heavier doors want hinge pairs set further apart and fixed into something solid. Glass to glass hinges let you hang a door off a fixed inline panel instead of a wall, which is often the answer in an awkward opening, but they transfer the whole load into that panel, so the panel then needs a bar to the wall or ceiling. These three choices move together. Decide them in isolation and you get a screen that technically fits and never feels right.

Will the wall actually hold a hinged glass door?

This is the question nobody asks until it is too late. A masonry wall will take a door hinge all day. A plasterboard stud wall will not, unless there is timber behind the board exactly where the hinge plates land. Hollow wall fixings in plasterboard carrying a 40kg door that swings twice a day will loosen, and once they loosen the board crumbles and the only honest repair involves taking tiles off.

So the fix happens before tiling, not after. Tell your builder where the hinges go and have noggins or a plywood backing sheet fitted into the stud at that height. It takes ten minutes at the framing stage. If the wall is already tiled and we find board behind the hinge position, we will tell you to change the layout, hang the door off a fixed panel with glass to glass hinges, or accept a fixed walk-in panel instead of a door. We will not fix a heavy door to something that will not hold it.

Has the door got anywhere to open?

In a small back-addition bathroom, the shower door and the room door often want the same air. Measure it on the floor with a tape and a pencil before you commit. An outward-opening screen door needs a clear arc, and in a 1.7 metre wide room that arc will meet the basin, the loo, or the bathroom door swinging in. The usual answers are an offset pivot that keeps most of the swing inside the tray, a door that opens both ways, a sliding or bypass door, or dropping the door altogether in favour of a fixed walk-in panel with an open entry.

Walk-in shower screens solve a lot of London bathrooms, but they need a longer tray or a bigger wet room floor so the open end sits far enough from the shower head. Put a 900mm fixed panel on a 900mm tray with the mixer on the near wall and you will mop the floor after every shower. The panel is not the problem. The geometry is.

When a framed or semi-framed enclosure is the better buy

Frameless is not automatically right, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. If the opening is badly out of true beyond what an adjustable wall profile can absorb, a framed enclosure hides a surprising amount of movement in its channels and will look neater than a frameless panel fighting a leaning wall. If the shower is in a rental or a flat you are about to sell, a framed unit does the job for less money. If you want sliding doors over a bath in a narrow room, framed and semi-framed systems do that more cheaply and more reliably than bespoke glass.

The honest trade-off is cleaning. A framed enclosure has a bottom channel, and that channel collects water, soap and limescale and is a nuisance for the life of the unit. A semi-framed screen is a reasonable middle: a slim profile where it is structurally useful, open glass elsewhere. We fit all three, and we will tell you which one your room is asking for rather than which one has the bigger invoice.

If you only change one thing after reading this, make it the order of work. Tile, then template, then make the glass. Everything else is recoverable. A panel cut to the wrong opening is not.