Don’t put your safety — or that of your clients, employees or residents — at risk. When a car park freezes overnight, the site still has to open at seven. Hants & Dorset Gardening Services has kept commercial sites across Dorset and Hampshire open through winter since 2004, with teams on call around the clock and more than 5,000 gritting visits carried out each season.

What We Grit and Clear

• Car parks and parking bays
• Fire exits and escape routes
• Footpaths and pedestrian walkways
• Access roads and service yards
• Building entrances and approaches
• Commercial premises, schools and residential developments

Gritting

We spread white marine salt using calibrated commercial spreading equipment, so coverage is even and nothing is wasted. White marine salt is a renewable resource and leaves markedly less residue than brown rock salt — which matters when the route from the car park runs across your reception carpet.

Snow Clearance

Mechanical and manual clearance, sequenced so the parts of your site people actually use come first: pedestrian access, building walkways, car parks and fire exits. Cleared snow is stacked where it will not melt back across a route or block a drain.

How We Decide When to Grit

We do not wait to be called, and we do not guess. Every site is monitored against the Met Office OpenSite Premium Data forecast service, which gives us postcode-specific daily reports covering the following 24 hours.

• Monitoring begins at 7am, every day of the season.
• Gritting is triggered when road surface temperature is forecast to fall below 0°C alongside frost, ice or snow.
• Your site is treated within the 24 hours before icy conditions arrive — not after.
• Every visit is GPS-tracked, giving a timestamped record of when each site was treated.

Your Duty of Care — and the Records to Evidence It

If you are responsible for a site that staff, visitors or residents use, you have a duty to take reasonable steps to keep it safe in freezing conditions. Reasonable steps are only worth anything if you can show you took them.

That is why every HDGS gritting visit is logged: the forecast that triggered it, the time the team arrived, and GPS confirmation of the route treated. If a claim is ever made against you, the record exists. Our clients use these logs as part of their own health and safety documentation.

Accreditation and Standards

• SafeContractor approved
• Fully insured, with public liability cover appropriate to commercial sites
• Method statements and site-specific risk assessments supplied before the season starts
• Trained operatives with appropriate PPE for night and low-visibility working

Booking for the Season

Winter contracts are agreed before the season begins, so your site is on the monitoring list from day one with a route plan already surveyed and agreed. We can also supply salt bins and seasonal salt where you would rather handle smaller areas in-house.

Contracts are usually set up between September and early November. If you are reading this in December, call us anyway — we will do what we can.

Areas Covered

We provide gritting and snow clearance across Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch, Wimborne and Ferndown, and more widely across Dorset, the BCP area, Hampshire, the New Forest and Salisbury.

Get a Winter Services Quote

Tell us the site and we will survey it, agree a route plan and give you a fixed seasonal price.

Call 01202 256788
Email info@hdgs.co.uk