Pergola or gazebo, and how tall can a privacy screen legally be?

A gazebo is built for weather protection first — a full or double roof, insect netting, sometimes curtains, designed to be sat under whatever the weather's doing. A pergola is more architectural: a structural frame, often with a retractable or sliding canopy rather than full coverage, built to define a space and give partial shade rather than complete shelter.

Privacy screens are a separate structure with their own real constraint: UK permitted development allows a garden boundary up to 2m without planning permission, dropping to 1m where it faces a highway — and a trellis added to the top of a fence counts toward that total height, which is easy to miss until it's already built too tall.

Rule one. Choose by how much weather you actually need to sit through

A gazebo's solid or double roof and netting are built to keep rain and insects out entirely, which is the right call for a space meant to be used regardless of weather. A pergola's retractable or sliding canopy gives you the choice — open for full sun, drawn across for shade — but it isn't built to shed serious rain the way a gazebo's dedicated roof is.

This is really a question about what the space is for: a gazebo suits somewhere you want usable rain or shine; a pergola suits somewhere you're mostly managing sun rather than weather in general.

Rule two. Two metres is the boundary figure to know before building anything tall

UK permitted development rights allow a fence, wall or gate up to 2m high without planning permission, measured from ground level — this covers most garden privacy screens outright. Where a boundary faces a highway used by vehicles, that limit drops to 1m, which in practice usually means a front boundary facing a road rather than a back or side garden fence.

This right can be removed or tightened on specific properties — an Article 4 direction, a listed building, or a conservation area can all override the standard 2m allowance, so it's worth checking your own property's status before assuming the general rule applies.

Rule three. A trellis topper adds to the total, it doesn't sit outside it

Add a trellis to the top of an existing 1.8m fence and the combined height is 2.1m — over the permitted-development limit, even though the fence panel itself was compliant on its own. This is the single most common way a garden boundary ends up taller than intended: the fence and the trellis get measured and approved separately in someone's head, when the rule measures the whole structure as one.

Our own privacy screens run about 198cm — just under the 2m limit on their own, which leaves no real headroom to add a trellis or climbing frame on top without checking the combined height first.

Four structures from our range

Two gazebos, two pergolas, and privacy screens including one with a built-in trellis — the exact case rule three is about.

The short version

A gazebo protects from real weather with a solid roof and netting; a pergola is more architectural, usually with partial, retractable shade instead. UK permitted development allows a 2m garden boundary without planning permission, 1m facing a highway — and a trellis on top of a fence counts toward that total, not on top of it.