Smart lock fitting in Didsbury and Chorlton

South Manchester keeps more of its original Victorian and Edwardian front doors than most of the city, and people who own them are usually not willing to have a large black plastic rectangle screwed to the front. Reasonably.

There are two ways round that. Some locks are genuinely discreet from outside — a small keypad or a handle-integrated reader rather than a slab. And some installs put everything on the inside face, keeping the street side of the door as it was.

Which is available depends on the door thickness and the existing mortice, which is what the survey is for.

Parts of Didsbury and Chorlton sit in conservation areas. That does not normally stop a lock change on a house — it bites on things like replacing the whole door or altering the frontage — but if your property is listed, the rules are different and stricter, and you should check before committing.

We will flag it if we think it applies. We are installers, not your planning department, so treat that as a prompt rather than advice.

A lot of stock around Withington and Fallowfield is let by the room. Codes suit that far better than keys do: each tenant gets their own, it changes at the end of the tenancy, and nobody is cutting keys in August because the last group did not hand them all back.