Locksmith in Hurlingham, Randburg

A good many Hurlingham properties have a back boundary that is not a boundary in the usual sense. The spruit and the green corridor run behind these streets, and along them runs a footpath that people genuinely use — walkers, runners, dog walkers, cyclists, all day and every day. That is one of the pleasures of living here and it is also the single most distinctive thing about securing a property on this side. A gate at the bottom of a long garden is a walk from the road — see locksmith near me.

The distinction worth drawing is between a back wall that faces another garden and a back wall that faces a public route. A wall onto a neighbour's garden is overlooked by that household, and anybody at it has to have got into their garden first. A wall onto a footpath is passed by dozens of strangers a day, every one of whom has a completely legitimate reason to be there — which means nobody standing at that wall looks out of place. Households in Hurlingham book car locksmith work on the same number as everything else described here.

That is not a reason to be uneasy about the greenbelt, which is an asset rather than a threat. It is a reason to treat the rear boundary as a frontage rather than as a back. Frontages get proper gates, sensible fittings and honest sightlines; backs get whatever was left over. On the streets where a property runs down to the path, swapping those assumptions round is most of the work, and it is generally straightforward lock repair or a modest fitting on one or two openings.

Rear garden gates are the recurring one, and they are almost always the property's oldest fitting. A gate onto the greenbelt was put in years ago so the household could walk the dog, and it has carried the same bolt or padlock ever since. On a boundary passed by strangers all day, that gate is doing the job of a front gate on the hardware of a garden one, and correcting it is inexpensive.

Second is what has grown along the back. Planting on a greenbelt boundary tends to be encouraged, because it screens the garden from the path — and it screens the path from the garden just as effectively. Households are frequently unaware that the last three metres of their own property cannot be seen from the house any more. Whether that matters is a judgement call, but it should at least be a known fact.

Third is the pool gate, the store and the outbuildings at the bottom of the garden, which on these properties are often the closest structures to the path and the least considered. A pool store or a garden shed sitting five metres from a public route, on a fitting chosen for a shed in the middle of a garden, is the sort of mismatch that only becomes obvious when somebody walks the boundary and looks back at the house.

The whole of the reasoning here follows from one reversal. Households instinctively fit the street side properly and the garden side casually, because the street is where strangers are. On a property backing onto the green corridor, strangers are on both sides — and on the garden side they are there in numbers, all day, entirely legitimately. The rear boundary should therefore get what the front one gets, and on most properties it currently does not.

The practical version starts with a walk on the outside. Go onto the path, turn round and look at your own property from there, which almost nobody has ever done. What is visible, what is reachable, what would somebody standing here be able to do without appearing to be doing anything unusual? Ten minutes of that answers more questions than an hour of discussion in the lounge, and it frequently turns up a gate the household had stopped noticing.

Then there is the planting, which needs an honest decision rather than a default. Screening the garden from the path is pleasant and it also screens the path from the house. Neither choice is wrong, but they are different choices and most people have never realised they made one. Where a household wants the screening kept, the answer is usually to fit the openings behind it properly — a modest lock change on the rear gate and the garden store covers it.