Street furniture is a collective term for objects and pieces of equipment installed on streets and roads for various purposes. The total street furniture market includes: benches, traffic barriers, bollards, post boxes, phone boxes, streetlamps, traffic lights, traffic signs, bus stops, tram stops, taxi stands, public lavatories, fountains, watering troughs, memorials, public sculptures, and waste receptacles.
Street furniture is used on roads and pavements, motorways, urban roads, and parks and leisure facilities. Manufacturers and suppliers of street furniture supply a number of other markets, but this report focuses on the local authority sector, and excludes other sectors such as Education, Healthcare, Rail & Transport, Residential Developments, Retail & Commercial, Restaurants & Bars, Sports & Leisure, Ministry of Defence, etc.
There are companies who manufacture in the UK and market their own products, and others who mainly manufacture for others and do not have a high profile with end users. However, a substantial volume of products is imported into the UK. Imported products tend to be the simpler products, with many originating from China. Many companies specialised in only one or two products, while some supply the whole range. Others will specialise purely in one type of material such as stainless steel or timber, and sometimes street furniture is only a very small part of the business.
Our forecasts indicate some growth over the 2018-2022 period, though rates of growth will be modest due to increasing pressures on Local Authority budgets. With grants from Central Government to Local Authorities falling, over the next few years urban landscaping will be regarded as a lower priority for spending compared to social services and therefore likely to be under continual pressure for funding. Therefore, local authorities will be looking for ways to save money and maintenance budgets for street furniture may be limited because of high demand from other areas of highway maintenance expenditure, such as filling pot holes and converting street lighting to LEDs.