Bricklaying in Lytchett Matravers
Repointing, brick repair, chimney stacks and the garden walls that move with the clay, across Lytchett Matravers and the lanes around it.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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The work
Brickwork in Lytchett Matravers: what we do, and what we look at first
Weather and ground movement do most harm to brickwork in Lytchett Matravers. Joints weathered back on the face of a post-war house that takes the wind, and a garden wall or a porch that has cracked because the clay underneath it moves. Weathered joints call for repointing. A crack from moving clay is a ground problem, and repointing it on its own is money spent twice.
A wall in Lytchett Matravers is due for work when the joints open, the faces blow or a crack appears. Open joints on one elevation, where you can put a screwdriver in past the mortar. Brick faces that have blown and gone sandy after a hard frost, so the wall looks pitted from the path. Or a crack: stepping up out of a window head, running down the join between the house and the garage, or opening along a boundary wall that was fine last winter.
We come and look at the wall, not at a photograph on a phone, because in this village a fair share of what looks like a pointing job is a rainwater job or a footing job showing up in the brickwork. You get a straight answer about whether it needs doing this year, which elevation to start with, and an itemised written price if you want one. The site visit and the quote are both free.
The work
Brickwork jobs in Lytchett Matravers
Post-war and 1970s brickwork. Most of the village went up between the 1950s and the mid 1980s, cavity built, in a hard cement mortar with a thin tidy joint. Weather rakes that joint back on the elevation facing the wind, and once water stands in an open joint a frost lifts the face off the brick beside it.
We cut out to sound mortar, match the mix and the sand for colour, and put back the profile the wall has, nearly always bucket handle at that age. There are plenty of bungalows in Lytchett Matravers, where one exposed elevation is less work than people expect.
Older cottages, walls and stacks. The houses along the old lanes and around the church are a different animal: solid wall, soft period brick, mortar never meant to be harder than the brick it holds. Those are raked by hand, never with a disc cutter near a soft arris, and repointed in an NHL lime mix, with a sample panel to look at in daylight first. Plots are generous here and a lot of them are walled, mostly with no damp proof course, so the bottom courses go soft first. We rebuild bowed lengths, reset coping and bond gate piers into the wall instead of sitting them on the end of it. Plenty of stacks no longer have a fire under them and still take weather from four sides, so we rebuild from below the damage, off a tower on a low bungalow stack or a scaffold where there is height to it. A crack over an opening usually means the lintel; one running level along a course can mean the ties have rusted and jacked the outer leaf. We say which it is before we quote.
How it runs
Brick repairs and rebuilds, and the permission question
Thomas looks at the wall, the stack or the damaged brickwork himself and prices it elevation by elevation, so you can see what each part costs to put right. The written quote lists access, taking down or cutting out, new bricks and matching them, the mortar, any lintel or wall ties, and clearing the site. One company is answerable throughout.
A garden wall or a pier by the drive needs no platform. A chimney on a seventies house needs a scaffold, and we agree where it stands before the day. Rubble and old mortar go in our skip and the drive is swept every night. Open a wall and find a rusted lintel, and the work stops while you look at the photo and the extra cost.
There is no conservation area over Lytchett Matravers, so repairing brickwork on an ordinary house to match needs no application, and Planning Portal guidance on external walls explains when changing how a wall looks does. Some of the fifteen listed entries in the parish may be walls or outbuildings rather than houses, so we check the address. On a listed wall, repointing is alteration and needs listed building consent first. Structural rebuilding goes through building control at Dorset Council, and a shared wall brings in the Party Wall etc. Act 1996.
Cost
Stacks, garden walls and the clay under them
We give no square metre rate: the joints and the cause decide the job, not the area. Where the brickwork is. A boundary wall is ground level work. A chimney stack on a detached house is scaffold work, and under the work at height rules that platform is costed as its own item. A cottage in the old part of Lytchett Matravers, fronting a narrow lane, can mean a scaffold on the road and a longer carry for every barrow.
What moved it. Lytchett Matravers is on cohesive clay, which shrinks as it dries out in a hot spell and swells again once winter rain soaks it. A crack stepping through the joints near a corner could be old and settled, or still on the move. Before pricing a rebuild we look at the pattern and at where the downpipes empty, because rebuilding without curing the cause just brings the crack back.
Matching. Seventies facing bricks can be hard to find now. Reclaimed bricks or a close match cost more than a stock brick, and a mortar that matches the colour and strength of the rest takes a trial mix or two.
Raking. On soft older brick the joints come out by hand, which is slow and sets the hours.
Ask any other quote how deep the joints are raked, by hand or disc, which bricks they plan to use, and what they think caused the crack.
If something has moved
A leaning wall or loose bricks overhead
A garden wall leaning out, a pier cracked after a car clipped it, or loose bricks on a chimney after a gale are the jobs that cannot wait. Keep people clear of anything that could fall, and ring us rather than send the form.
The first visit is about making it safe: taking down loose courses, propping or fencing off a leaning section, then pricing the repair once we can see how far the movement goes. On this clay, a crack that has opened after a dry summer is worth a look soon, though it is rarely an emergency. Booked jobs run from Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. A call that goes unanswered means we are mid-job, and we ring back as soon as we can.
The one local thing
The clay moves, and the walls show it before the house does
The ground under the village is a clay that swells when it is wet and shrinks back when it dries out. A house on a proper deep foundation rides that out. What does not ride it out is everything built shallow and built later: garden walls, porches, a conservatory base, a garage added on the side, gate piers.
That is why so many cracks in Lytchett Matravers are in a boundary wall, or exactly on the join between the house and something bolted onto it, rather than in the middle of a main elevation. A crack that opens through a dry summer and closes again by February is the ground talking, not the mortar, and repointing it in July means doing it again.
What that changes for you is the order of the work. Where rainwater lands matters more here than it does on free draining sand: a downpipe emptying onto a border beside a wall, a gully that has stopped taking water, or a soakaway sat too close to a footing keeps one patch of clay wet all year while the rest of it dries and shrinks. Approved Document H sets out where surface water is allowed to go.
Sort that first, watch the crack through one full season, and then repoint. The same goes for a mature tree within its own height of a shallow wall. When a wall has genuinely gone we rebuild it on a deeper footing with piers at intervals and a movement joint where the run is long, which costs more on the day and stops you paying for the same crack every few years.
Who you are dealing with
Your bricklayer, and the company behind him
Thomas Hannen owns the business, and he comes out to see the wall and price it himself. Lytchett Matravers is about eleven miles from our base in Boscombe, and we cover the BH16 lanes out to Upton, Lytchett Minster and Organford and on to Corfe Mullen and Wareham under Dorset Council, and Poole under BCP Council.
We trade as Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which anyone can check. On Checkatrade a verified customer gave the work 10 out of 10. There is nothing to pay for the visit or for the written, itemised quote. Before you book a visit in Lytchett Matravers, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Lytchett Matravers?
Most repairs in Lytchett Matravers need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.
| Question | In Lytchett Matravers |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Lytchett Matravers. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Lytchett Matravers, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Lytchett Matravers. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Lytchett Matravers. |
Questions
Questions about bricklaying in Lytchett Matravers
Why does our garden wall crack open every summer?
The ground under Lytchett Matravers is cohesive and rated significant for shrink and swell, so it swells through a wet winter and drops again in a dry summer. A garden wall usually sits on a shallow footing and follows that movement, while the house on deeper foundations does not. Rebuilding the top few courses will not stop it. We dig a trial hole at one end before quoting anything.
Should the downpipe be discharging that close to the wall?
Almost certainly not: water landing beside a footing changes the moisture in cohesive ground far more than rainfall spread across a garden does, and on the shrink swell soil under Lytchett Matravers that is a structural question instead of a damp one. We track where every gully, soakaway and gutter overflow ends up before touching the brickwork. Moving one outlet clear of the wall is often the useful half of the repair.
What fails on the seventies houses in the village?
The perp joints and the bed under the cill, not the whole face. A large share of the housing here went up between 1945 and 1982, so these are cavity walls pointed in cement, not solid walls built in lime. Thin cement joints have nothing in reserve and go back fast once frost gets into them. We cut out what has failed to a proper depth and leave the sound joints alone.
Fifteen buildings are listed here. What does that mean?
It means the rules run address by address, not village wide. Lytchett Matravers has 15 listed entries, the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin among them, and no conservation area of its own, so most houses face no control at all on a repair. If your address is one of the 15, consent from Dorset Council comes before a joint is opened and the mortar mix forms part of it.
Can you get scaffold down the side of a bungalow?
On most of them, yes. On a single storey elevation a mobile tower usually does the job without standing anything on the neighbour's ground. Where the gap is genuinely too tight we work the front and rear and carry the muck through rather than barrowing it round. Thomas Hannen measures the access at the visit so the quote carries the right lift.
Nearby, and next door
Bricklaying near Lytchett Matravers
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Get an honest look at the wall
Tell us which elevation is bothering you. We will come out, look at the whole building and the ground it sits on, and put a written itemised price in your hand.