Bricklaying in Three Legged Cross
Gate piers, boundary and retaining walls, garages and workshops, and brick repairs on the house, across Three Legged Cross and BH21.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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Most brickwork in Three Legged Cross is outside the house, not on it: gate piers, boundary and retaining walls, garages, stores and workshops. Nearly all of them come down to what is under the wall and what is on top of it, and both are cheaper to get right than to put right.
Brickwork trouble in Three Legged Cross is usually a pier or wall, an outbuilding, or the house itself. A brick pier or entrance wall that has been clipped by a vehicle or has slowly gone out of plumb. An outbuilding, a garage or a workshop that needs building, extending or making sound again. Or brickwork on the house itself that has started to shed its faces or crack, usually on the side that takes the wind and rain.
We come out and look before we say anything about price. That means digging a small hole to see what a leaning wall is actually standing on, scraping a joint to find out what the old mortar is, tapping for loose brick, and photographing the lot so you are looking at the same evidence we are. Then you get told plainly what needs doing, what does not, and in what order.
The work
Brickwork jobs here, and what they involve
Gate piers and entrance walls. Plenty of the properties along the lanes in Three Legged Cross have a pair of brick piers at the drive, and they take a hard life: clipped by wing mirrors, carrying a heavy gate on one side only, and built years ago on a footing that was never much more than a scrape.
A pier that has gone out of plumb does not come back. We take it down, dig a proper footing, rebuild it with the gate ironwork set into the brickwork as it goes up rather than bolted on afterwards, and cap it so water stays out of the middle of the pier.
Walls on ground that holds water. The ground round the village is sandy and holds water rather than draining away from it, and both matter under a wall. Sand does not grip the side of a trench, so a footing has to be dug wider and the hole worked safely, not left open. On a gate pier the foundation is more than half the job, and a retaining wall holding a bank up needs weep holes and a drained backing or the water behind it will push it over. Coping gets re-bedded first, always, because an open wall top is what kills most garden walls in Three Legged Cross.
Most houses in Three Legged Cross are from the seventies or later, so the brickwork was pointed in a sand and cement mix that has usually lasted. What fails is local: the exposed gable, the run under an overflowing gutter, the bottom course where a border has been built up against the wall and over the damp proof course, which keeps it wet enough to start spalling at the first hard frost. Those bricks come out whole and go back matched for colour from a reclaimed batch with the same weathering on it, with a sample panel to look at before the rest follows, and the joints get raked back by hand. Galvanised wall ties from that era are reaching the end of their life, which shows as fine horizontal cracking at regular heights, and a rusting lintel over a window or a garage opening lifts the course above it. Both are repaired in place.
How it runs
Building or repairing brickwork on a Three Legged Cross plot
Thomas Hannen comes out, looks at the wall with you, and prices it himself. On houses in Three Legged Cross that might be a garden wall, a pier by a drive, a cracked panel under a window, or a garage being opened up. The quote is itemised by job: access, digging and footings, raking out, the mortar mix, the bricks and any replacements, and disposal. If repointing is all a wall needs, we say so.
The bricks are laid to that one quote, from start to finish. Most plots have a drive, so a mixer and a pallet of bricks can sit on your own ground. Most brickwork here is low enough for a tower. Spoil and offcuts leave with us and the site is swept each day. A shallow footing, or one lifted by old roots, is something we photograph and price for you before any more digging.
Like for like repairs need no application. Three Legged Cross has no conservation area and only a single listed building, so the brick and mortar are yours to pick. Building control is what matters: a new opening, a beam or a garage turned into a room all need it from Dorset Council. On a shared wall, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 gives your neighbour a formal notice period.
Cost
Footings, sand and bricks: the brickwork price explained
We do not quote a rate per square metre. Walls of equal size can take very different time, depending on what is under them and what they are built from.
The ground. The soil round the village is wet sand, and GeoSure rates its shrink swell hazard as significant in places. A new garden wall or pier needs a footing deep enough to sit below that movement, and a crack in an old wall is often the ground, not the brick. Digging deeper takes time and fills a skip.
Matching the brick. Most houses in Three Legged Cross are seventies and eighties facing brick. Some are still made, some are not. A patch that sticks out looks worse than the crack, so finding a good match can take longer than the laying.
Access and height. A low wall by the drive needs nothing. A gable or chimney means a tower or scaffold, which the work at height rules turn into its own priced item. On a terrace the platform may cross next door's frontage.
Cracks. Stitching a crack with helical bars is a different job from taking out and rebuilding a section, and which one you need depends on whether the movement has stopped.
When comparing, ask how deep the footing goes, how the brick will be matched, and whether a cracked section is being stitched or rebuilt.
If something has moved
A wall that has cracked, leant or dropped bricks
Phone rather than use the form. A garden wall leaning towards a footpath, a pier by the drive that rocks, or bricks loose above a window all come first, because a child or a car can be under them.
After a dry summer or a wet winter, cracks here often show where the ground has moved. The first visit is about safety: we prop or take down anything loose, and look at whether the movement is still going, then price the proper repair. Bookings run Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. If we are up a ladder and miss you, we will get back to you as soon as we can.
Worth knowing
What you can build without asking, and what you cannot
Start with what needs nothing. Repairing, repointing or rebuilding an existing wall as it was is maintenance, whatever height it is. A new wall, gate or fence is permitted development up to two metres, or one metre where it fronts a road used by vehicles, and the Planning Portal sets out exactly where that line falls.
So ordinary garden brickwork, a pier rebuilt, a boundary wall put back, a low front wall added, needs no application at all. That is worth saying plainly, because in a village surrounded by open land people tend to assume everything has to be asked for.
What is different here is that Three Legged Cross sits in the Green Belt, and Green Belt policy is about new building rather than repairs. Inside your own garden a modest outbuilding can still be permitted development if it meets the rules on size, height and where it sits relative to the house. Go past that, or put the building on land that is not part of the garden, a paddock or a field, and it is judged as new building in the Green Belt, where the starting position is that it is inappropriate unless it falls into a narrow set of exceptions.
The practical advice is simple: check the principle before you pay anyone for drawings, and see the other permissions you may need while you are at it. Building it in brick and block instead of timber does not change the planning answer either way, it only changes what it costs and how long it lasts, and we would rather you knew that before we quote it.
Who you are dealing with
Bricklayers covering BH21 from Boscombe
We come out to Three Legged Cross, Woodlands, Verwood, West Moors and Ashley Heath from our base in Boscombe, about nine miles away. Dorset Council handles planning and building control. The free site visit is also the survey: we walk the wall with you and dig where we need to.
Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, and the business is Thomas Hannen's. He does the pricing on site himself. A verified customer on Checkatrade gave us 10 out of 10. The itemised quote in writing costs you nothing. Before you book a visit in Three Legged Cross, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Three Legged Cross?
Most repairs in Three Legged Cross 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 Three Legged Cross |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Three Legged Cross. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Three Legged Cross, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Three Legged Cross. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Three Legged Cross. |
Questions
Questions about bricklaying in Three Legged Cross
Is there any old brickwork here that needs lime?
Hardly any brickwork here needs lime. Very little of Three Legged Cross predates 1919, so almost every wall here is a cavity built in cement with a bucket handle joint. Lime belongs on a solid wall that has to breathe through its mortar, and there are not many of those around here. Put it on a modern cavity wall and you have simply made the joint too soft.
Does Green Belt stop us putting up a new garden wall?
Not a repair or a rebuild on the same line, no. Green Belt policy is aimed at buildings and outbuildings, not boundary walls, so it is largely beside the point for brickwork repairs around Three Legged Cross and becomes relevant once you extend or add something free standing. If the plan is a wall taller than what stood there, or a structure instead of a wall, it is worth a call to Dorset Council first.
How deep do footings go for a wall on this ground?
Deeper than most people expect, because the ground here is wet sand, GeoSure rates its shrink swell hazard as significant in places, and it moves with the seasons. A garden wall on a shallow strip will crack in its first dry summer, usually diagonally near the ends where the wall is least restrained. We dig to firm undisturbed ground, keep the concrete below the zone that dries out, and build piers into anything beyond a short run instead of relying on the wall alone.
Lots of homes here are bungalows. Does that help?
It keeps the job off scaffold. On a single storey elevation the whole wall can be worked from a low tower, which is quicker and leaves nothing standing in the garden for a fortnight. It also puts the brickwork closer to the soil, so the pointing at the bottom of a bungalow wall is normally worse than the pointing up at eaves level.
A car has clipped our gate pier. Can it be rebuilt?
Yes. A pier that has been hit is usually cracked well below the visible damage, so patching the top of it puts good brick onto a broken base. We drop it to sound work, keep any cap or coping that survived, and rebuild in the same bond with a bar through the middle where the pier is tall or carrying a gate. Hinges and latches get set into the new work rather than bolted onto the face.
Nearby, and next door
Bricklaying near Three Legged Cross
Nearby places we also cover for bricklaying, with straight-line distances from Three Legged Cross, and the other trades we offer in Three Legged Cross itself.
Bricklaying nearby
Our other trades in Three Legged Cross
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Get a written price for your brickwork here
Free site visit, free itemised quote, and an honest answer about what the ground under the wall is doing.