Guard your good gratings lest they be gone

A posting about gratings, eh.............now I know my life's taken a wrong turn! I just happened to notice in passing the other day that with the high price of scrap metal, the theft of gulley gratings is apparently becoming a real national problem. So serious has scrap metal theft become that last year a national crime unit was established to try and combat it.

It seems like gulley grate theft is at its worst in rural areas. A quick sweep on Google found only two examples in London - one in Harrow a couple of years ago and one in Docklands (though stealing a slightly different kind of grate).

Replacements cost between £300 and £500 a pop. So councils are increasingly likely to be turning to composite replacements rather than iron ones.

As far as I'm aware this issue hasn't yet hit Haringey. But if you should see someone taking an unusual interest in your favourite gulley cover and you want to avoid the embarrassment of admitting to your friends that your street has composite gulley covers, keep 'em peeled (as Shaw used to say*).


(*Not George Bernard. I'm talking about the illustrious Shaw Taylor and the never to be missed Police Five Anyone remember that?.)