What are the rules for a smoking shelter in the UK?

A smoking shelter must keep at least 50% of its sides permanently open, otherwise it counts as a “substantially enclosed” space under the Health Act 2006 and smoking inside it is prohibited. Every shelter in this range is built to that 50%-open design. Site it clear of entrances, opening windows and ventilation intakes so smoke is not drawn back into the building.

How much does a smoking shelter cost?

In this range, four of the five shelters sit between £1,481.83 and £1,903.92 — a spread of £422.09 covering twinwall panels, punched steel panels and the wall-mounted unit. The fifth, BSS27Z, is £6,538.68. Across the wider UK market, domestic garden smoking shelters start at roughly £390 and commercial steel units run to around £6,400.

Why is the Economy smoking shelter the most expensive one?

“Economy” is GPC’s name for a product line, not a description of where it sits on the price list. BSS27Z is £6,538.68, which is 4.41 times the price of the cheapest shelter in the range and £4,634.76 more than the dearest of the other four. If you are looking for the lowest-cost option, the twinwall shelter BSS204 at £1,481.83 is it.

What is the difference between twinwall and punched steel side panels?

16mm twinwall fluted plastic is translucent, so the shelter stays light inside and does not create a dark corner. It is the cheapest option. Powder-coated punched steel resists knocks and deliberate damage and is the better choice on industrial sites and in yards where vehicles manoeuvre nearby. Punched steel costs 23.1% to 28.5% more than twinwall depending on which model you choose.

Which punched steel shelter should I buy, BSS208 or BSS209?

BSS209 in most cases. It has punched steel sides and a back panel and costs £1,823.70. BSS208 has punched steel sides only and costs £1,903.92 — so the model with the additional back panel is £80.22 cheaper. Choose BSS208 only if you specifically want an open back, usually because the shelter sits against an existing wall or fence. Neither listing publishes dimensions, so ask us to confirm the sizes before ordering.

Does a smoking shelter need to be fixed to the ground?

The free-standing box-section shelters in this range need no ground fixing. They are secured using six 600 × 600mm paving slabs, which are not supplied. That means no drilling, no groundworks and no concrete base, and it keeps the shelter movable if your site layout changes.

How many people does one of these smoking shelters hold?

None of the five listings in this range publishes a person capacity or a dimension, which is unusual for this product category — most competing shelters are sold as 3-person, 4-person or 6-person units. Rather than estimate, tell us how many people need to use the shelter at the busiest point of the day and we will obtain the dimensions and capacity from GPC in writing before you order.

Do I need a forklift to take delivery of a smoking shelter?

Yes for the free-standing box-section shelters. The manufacturer states that a forklift is needed to unload these units. If there is no forklift or telehandler available on site on the delivery day, arrange one in advance or let us know so the delivery can be planned around it.

Smoking Shelters | Compliant 50%-Open Workplace Shelters

A smoking shelter gives staff a defined, weather-protected place to smoke away from doorways, opening windows and air intakes, and keeps cigarette litter in one manageable spot instead of across the car park. Every smoking shelter on this page is manufactured in the UK by GPC Industries and built so that at least half of its sides stay permanently open — which is what keeps it outside the Health Act 2006 definition of a "substantially enclosed" smoke-free space. For the rules in plain English, see our smoking shelter regulations guide.

Before anything else, two things worth knowing about this range, because neither is obvious from the product titles.

Three of these shelters share the same name — here is which is which

Three separate products in this range are all titled "GPC Smoking Shelters". They are different shelters at three different prices, and the only place the difference appears is in the model code. If you are comparing them on a listing page, this is the table you need:

Model	What you actually get	Price
BSS204	Free-standing, 16mm twinwall fluted plastic side panels	£1,481.83
BSSW6Z	Wall-mounted — fixes back to an existing wall	£1,685.46
BSS209	Free-standing, *punched steel sides and* back panel**	£1,823.70
BSS208	Free-standing, punched steel sides only	£1,903.92
BSS27Z	Free-standing, colour-finished (green)	£6,538.68

A second thing the listings do not make clear: each of the three BSS20x descriptions says the shelter is "available with 16mm twinwall fluted plastic side panels or powder coated punched steel side & back panels". That is true of the range as a whole and not true of any individual listing — each one is a single fixed configuration, and the panel choice is made by picking a different product, not by choosing from a dropdown. If you are on the twinwall listing and you want punched steel, you need BSS208 or BSS209 instead.

The price ladder, and the one number that will catch you out

Four of the five shelters sit within £422.09 of each other — a 28.5% spread from cheapest to dearest across twinwall, wall-mounted and both punched-steel builds. The fifth does not.

The shelter named "Economy" is the most expensive one here, by a very wide margin. BSS27Z is £6,538.68. That is £4,634.76 more than BSS208, the dearest of the other four — 3.43 times its price, and 4.41 times the cheapest shelter in the range. "Economy" is GPC's name for a product line, not a statement about where it sits on the price list. If you are working down a sorted list looking for the cheapest option, the word will point you in exactly the wrong direction.

Put against the wider market, the same unit is at the very top of it. Search "smoking shelter" and the shopping results run from around £26 for a domestic garden gazebo up to roughly £6,400 for the dearest commercial unit on the first several pages. At £6,538.68, BSS27Z is priced above all of them. We would rather say that than let you find it out at checkout. If the colour finish is not the specific thing you need, one of the other four will do the same job for between a fifth and a third of the money.

The back panel is free — and then some

This is the useful inversion in the range. BSS208 gives you punched steel sides for £1,903.92. BSS209 gives you punched steel sides and a back panel for £1,823.70. The model with more steel on it is £80.22 cheaper.

Read from the twinwall entry point, the arithmetic is clearer still. Moving from twinwall (BSS204, £1,481.83) to punched steel sides only (BSS208) costs £422.09, or 28.5%. Moving from twinwall to punched steel sides plus a back panel (BSS209) costs £341.87, or 23.1%. The more complete shelter is the cheaper upgrade. Unless you have a specific reason to want an open back — usually because the shelter sits against a wall or fence that already closes that side — BSS209 is the punched-steel model to buy.

One honest caveat, and it matters: none of these listings publishes a dimension, so we cannot tell you that BSS208 and BSS209 are the same size. They may not be. If the difference between them turns on footprint rather than panels, ask us to confirm the sizes in writing before you order — see the section on what these listings do not tell you, below.

Wall-mounted costs more, not less

It is natural to assume that the shelter which uses your existing wall as one of its structures will be the cheap one. It is not. BSSW6Z at £1,685.46 is £203.63 (13.7%) more than the cheapest free-standing shelter. Choose the wall-mounted unit because of what it does for your footprint and your site layout — it takes up less ground, it can tuck against a building line, and it does not need a free-standing position in a car park or yard. Do not choose it expecting to save money, because you will not.

Twinwall or punched steel: how to actually decide

The two panel materials do different jobs and the choice is usually settled by the site rather than by preference.

16mm twinwall fluted plastic (BSS204) — translucent, so the shelter stays light inside and does not create a dark corner in a car park at night. Cheapest in the range. The right default for offices, schools, healthcare sites and anywhere the shelter is in a visible, low-traffic position.
Powder-coated punched steel (BSS208, BSS209) — takes knocks, resists deliberate damage and does not go brittle or cloudy. The right choice on industrial sites, in yards where vehicles manoeuvre nearby, and anywhere the shelter has previously been vandalised. Costs 23.1–28.5% more than twinwall.

Both builds use the same structure underneath: heavy-duty box section steel with a galvanised sheet steel roof. The punched panels are powder coated; the roof is galvanised. If you want to understand what that combination means for how the shelter weathers, our guide to galvanised versus powder-coated steel covers the trade-off properly.

What these listings do not tell you — and what to ask for

We would rather set this out plainly than let you work it out from a gap on the page. Across all five shelters in this range, checked product by product:

No dimensions are published. Not one of the five gives a width, a depth or a height.
No person capacity is published. This is the significant one. Almost every competing smoking shelter on the market is sold by the number of people it holds — 3-person, 4-person, 6-person, 12-person. None of ours is described that way.
No weight, no warranty, no lead time and no stock position appears on any of the five.
Construction detail is published on three of the five. The BSS20x shelters state the box section, the panel materials and the galvanised roof. BSS27Z and BSSW6Z publish a model code, a one-line description and a price, and nothing else.

The practical consequence is that the usual sizing rule — allow roughly half a metre of standing width per smoker at realistic peak use — is advice you cannot apply to these listings on your own. So do not try to. Tell us how many people need to use the shelter at the busiest point of the day and we will get the dimensions and the capacity from GPC in writing before you commit to anything. That is a better order of operations than guessing from a photograph.

Siting and installation

The free-standing box-section shelters need no ground fixing. They are secured using six 600 × 600mm paving slabs, which are not supplied — so there is no drilling, no groundworks and no concrete base to arrange. That matters more than it sounds: it makes the shelter movable if your site layout changes, and it avoids a planning and groundworks conversation on a leased site.

A forklift is needed to offload these units on delivery. This is stated by the manufacturer on the three BSS20x shelters and it is a genuine delivery constraint, not a formality. If you do not have a forklift or a telehandler on site on the delivery day, arrange one, or tell us in advance so the delivery can be planned around it. A shelter sitting on a lorry because nothing on site can lift it is the most common avoidable problem with this product category.

On placement, three rules cover most situations:

Distance from the building. Keep the shelter clear of entrances, opening windows and ventilation intakes. Smoke drawn back into a building through an air intake defeats the purpose of having the shelter and generates the complaints you installed it to prevent.
Orientation. Point the open face away from the prevailing wind. A shelter with its open side into the weather does not get used, and an unused shelter puts people back in the doorway.
Litter. Add a cigarette bin. Without one the shelter concentrates the litter problem rather than solving it.

This is a workplace range, not a garden one

Worth being direct about, because the search results for "smoking shelter" mix two entirely separate markets. There is a domestic segment — wooden and polycarbonate garden smoking shelters at roughly £390 to £600 — and there is a commercial segment of steel structures for workplaces, schools and public sites. Everything here is in the second group. Our range starts at £1,481.83 because these are fabricated steel units built to stand outside on a working site for years and to survive being used by dozens of people a day.

If what you want is a shelter for a private garden, this is not the right page and a £450 timber unit will serve you better. We do not stock one and we would rather point you elsewhere than sell you something at three times the price you were expecting.

The rest of the outdoor range

Smoking shelters sit within our wider outdoor shelters range. If you are specifying outdoor provision as a whole rather than a single shelter, the adjacent collections are:

Cycle shelters — covered, open-sided bike shelters for workplaces and schools. Worth knowing before you compare: cycle shelters in this range start at £5,596.98, which is 3.78 times the price of the cheapest smoking shelter. They are much larger structures and the two should not be budgeted as though they are equivalent.
Bin shelters — for wheeled bins, keeping waste tidy and out of the weather. Our bin shelter and bin store buying guide covers commercial sizing.
Storage vaults — lockable outdoor steel stores at 700mm, 1370mm and 2500mm wide, for equipment that has to live outside but cannot be left open.
Outdoor canopies and shelters — larger covered structures for protecting plant, stock and vehicles.

For sizing and specification help across the whole outdoor range, see the smoking shelter and cycle shelter buying guide, or contact our team with the number of users and the site constraints and we will come back with the dimensions and a recommendation.