Industries Served
Construction sites need storage and handling that stands up to the weather, improves safety and keeps materials and plant moving on programme. Lowe manufactures gas bottle cages, pipe racks, secure stillages and material handling equipment built to take site abuse.
Every unit is UK-manufactured, UKCA-certified and engineered to order — from a single cage to a fleet standardised across sites.
How Lowe helps
Made to order
Tell us what you handle and how it moves — we'll scope a load-tested, UK-manufactured solution and quote it, usually the same working day.
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Site conditions are the design brief. Units get dragged, loaded by a telehandler whose driver cannot see the far side, left standing in water, and moved between compounds several times before a job finishes. Equipment specified for a warehouse fails early in that environment, and usually fails in a way that puts the contents on the ground.
That pushes the design towards heavier sections, reinforced corners and simple, repairable construction, and it makes finish a real decision — galvanising for units that live outdoors for the length of a programme, paint or powder coating where units are stored under cover or colour-coded by trade, compound or hire fleet.
It also pushes towards units that work with the plant already on site. Forklift pockets, telehandler access and a base that tolerates uneven ground do more for productivity than any refinement inside the frame.
Gas cylinders are the clearest case for purpose-built storage. A cage keeps cylinders upright and restrained, uses open construction so the store stays ventilated, segregates what needs segregating, and locks against theft — which also makes the site’s own storage arrangements straightforward to show an inspector. Cylinder handlers cover the other half of the problem, moving bottles around site without manual handling.
Pipe, conduit, rebar and section stock are the other recurring hazard. Loose lengths stacked against a hoarding roll, trap hands and get damaged. Pipe racks hold lengths in a defined bay, keep them off the ground, and let a single item be drawn out without destabilising the rest of the stack.
General material stillages cover everything else — fixings, formwork components, small plant, offcuts. Most of the value there is in stopping the drift towards loose piles that eats compound space and generates a tidy-up nobody has budgeted for.
Contractors run the same equipment across several sites at once, and units migrate. A standardised fleet — a small number of types that stack together, load to a predictable trailer plan and take the same replacement parts — moves between projects without becoming somebody’s problem to sort out at the far end.
Because units are built to a retained drawing, later batches match earlier ones. Manufacture is in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, with UKCA marking where applicable, and units can be identified and marked so equipment coming back off a project can be traced to the right owner or cost centre.
Recommended ranges
Our capability
Send a drawing, a sample or a photograph of the part. Our engineers size the unit around what it carries and how it is handled, then build it in Staffordshire to a specification you sign off before a single length of steel is cut.
Load-tested · UK-manufactured · certified where required
Talk to an engineer →Why Lowe
Designed and manufactured around your components, handling equipment and floor layout — made to order or fully bespoke.
Engineered and load-tested for safe stacking, forklift handling and demanding industrial duty cycles.
UK-manufactured to recognised standards, with certification available on custom builds and repeatable weld and build quality.
Manufactured in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire — short lead times and a direct line to the people building your kit.
Questions
Hot-dip galvanising is the usual answer for units that live outdoors for the length of a programme, because the coating covers welds and cut edges where site damage tends to start corrosion. Paint or powder coating suits units stored under cover, or where colour-coding by compound, trade or hire fleet is useful.
Most sites want them to be, for two reasons: cylinders are a theft target, and controlling access is part of showing that storage is managed rather than incidental. A cage should also hold cylinders upright and restrained, with open construction so the store stays ventilated. We build to the cylinder sizes and quantities you actually hold.
Only if they were designed and tested for lifting. Standard site stillages, cages and pipe racks are built for forklift and telehandler handling. Where units are craned — lifted to a level, over a hoarding line, or down into a basement — you need certified lifting stillages, which are a separate range designed for that duty and supplied with the relevant documentation.
Usually. Send dimensions, photographs and the stacking arrangement, and we will design so new units nest and stack with the existing fleet. If the units you already hold vary between batches, it is worth deciding which one becomes the standard before ordering, otherwise the mismatch just propagates through the fleet.
It depends on how long units stay on a project and whether they move between sites. Owned, standardised units tend to make sense where the same equipment recurs across projects and repeated hire and off-hire handling is adding up. We can advise on the design either way — the commercial call is yours.
Other industries
