Shower Screens
Updated
A shower screen is one of those bathroom buys that looks straightforward in the listing photograph and gets very specific the moment you measure. Glass thickness, hinge type, frame finish, single-fold or pivot, fixed panel: five decisions the planner doesn't always tell you about. Get the thickness and hinge right and the screen will outlast the bathroom around it; cheap on either and the door will start to creak inside two years.
The specifications that matter are glass thickness (6mm is the budget standard, 8mm is the comfort tier, 10mm is the premium feel) and hinge mechanism. Heavy 8-10mm glass needs proper top-and-bottom pivots with a solid wall-fixing rather than the strip-bracket cheap fitments use; thinner 6mm glass is fine on a budget enclosure but slips out of true sooner. Robert Dyas stocks the full breadth, from 6mm to 10mm panels in pivot, sliding-bypass, bifold and walk-in formats, from £18 up to £513; Cheap Furniture Warehouse covers the £60-£155 single-panel walk-in bracket.
We compare shower screens across UK retailers daily by glass thickness, opening style, frame finish, and bathroom-floor footprint. The grid below filters by these specs so the screen you order fits the bathroom you've already drawn out. read more…
19 Shower Screens from 3 UK Retailers in May ’26
Glass thickness and what each grade buys you
Shower-screen glass comes in three practical thicknesses. 6mm is the bathroom-budget standard; you'll find it on every sub-£150 enclosure and it's perfectly serviceable for a household of two. The glass is reassuringly heavy in a 1900mm panel but flexes slightly under a sliding-door mechanism and shows wear at the hinge edge sooner. 8mm is the comfort tier, used on most £200-£400 enclosures and the right glass for daily multi-person use; the panel sits more solidly, hinges last longer, and the visual depth reads as quality. 10mm is the premium grade and starts at the £350 mark; 10mm walk-in panels sit straight without a stabilising bar in many configurations, which is the cleanest look.
Opening styles: pivot, slide, bifold, fixed
Pivot-hinge doors are the simplest mechanism, a solid door that swings on top-and-bottom hinges. They suit alcoves and quadrant enclosures with floor space to swing into. Sliding-bypass doors (one panel slides behind the other) save the floor footprint but need careful runner alignment to stop drips at the overlap. Bifold doors fold into a Z-shape and suit narrow bathrooms where neither swing nor slide work. Fixed walk-in panels are the design-led choice, one large fixed pane against the wall, no mechanism, but they need a tray with the correct waste position and a properly sealed wall channel.
Frame finish and how it dates
Chrome is the safest mid-market frame finish: almost any tap, towel rail, and shower head matches, and it cleans easily. Matte black has aged better than expected since 2019 and now reads as contemporary rather than trend-led; the only catch is hard-water spotting shows more visibly than on chrome. Brushed brass and gold are riskier, since the finish dates faster and limescale is harder to remove. Frameless (clear-glass-only) screens with concealed fittings give the cleanest look but cost £100-£200 more than the equivalent framed screen and are harder to align without a steady hand.
Coatings worth paying for
The most useful coating is a hydrophobic glass treatment (often called EasyClean or ClearShield); it sheds water rather than holding droplets, so limescale builds up slower and the panel stays clearer between cleans. Expect 5-7 years on a hot-water household before the coating wears down. The £30-£50 premium over an untreated panel pays back fast in cleaning time saved. Anti-slip coatings on shower-tray panels are different and worth checking separately; that's the floor not the screen.
What to confirm before ordering
Three things stop most returns: confirm the wall is square (use a builder's square, not "looks straight"), confirm the floor is level (out by 5mm and the door won't sit right), and confirm the wall-fixing surface, since fixing into plasterboard rather than tiled studwork needs heavy-duty wall plugs and doesn't suit a heavy 10mm panel. If the existing wall isn't ready for a frameless premium screen, the framed-pivot mid-tier from Robert Dyas at £200-£400 is a much better buy than fighting an installation.
