Driveways in Bearwood
Estate drives relaid on a base that will hold a car, patios that fall away from the house, and a written price before anything is lifted.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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If your blocks were laid when the house was built, they are not worn out. They have run out of base. Relaying the same blocks on a proper build up is nearly always cheaper than a new surface, and on a Bearwood drive it is the first thing we check.
On this side of BH11 a failing drive gives itself away like this. The drive has dropped into a saucer where the car stands and rain sits in it. The blocks have crept sideways into the grass, so the pattern has opened up and there is a finger wide gap along the edge.
Or the back is the problem: a small paved yard that greened over, tipped towards the kitchen wall and now holds water at the door. We come and look at it in person, put a level across it, and take a few blocks up so we can see the depth of what is underneath. That half hour decides whether you are buying a repair or a rebuild, and you get told which before anyone writes a number down.
The work
Estate block paving, thirty-odd years on
The original drives need relaying. About a third of the homes here went up in the 1980s, the largest single wave, and the developer's drives went down fast: a shallow bed of scalpings, blocks on top, edges only where the plot needed them.
They lasted a long time and now they are giving up all at once, in the same two places, with rutting under the wheels and blocks tipping in. We lift them by hand, stack what is reusable, dig out the tired material with a small machine, cut back to a firm formation and rebuild the sub-base in two compacted layers over a geotextile membrane. Sound blocks go back down, and any broken ones are made up from a matching range.
Edges, which is what actually failed. On the terraced rows the frontages ran into open lawn with nothing holding the paving in. Blocks only stay tight because they push against each other, so the moment one side has nothing to push against, the whole field of them walks. New work gets a concrete edge restraint or a kerb bedded and haunched along every open side, with a planting border kept back off it and no soil piled against it.
Parking two cars where the builder allowed for one is the other job on the Bearwood estate. Tandem drives and a strip of front lawn taken in are the usual answers, and either way the drainage changes, which is where the surface gets chosen: permeable block, resin bound over a sound base, or tarmac where you want it plain and quick. Widening often means a wider vehicle crossing as well, which is a separate job with the council, not something we can pave up to.
Rear gardens on this estate are short, so the patio is often the whole garden and sits hard against the house. The usual faults are a level crept up to the damp proof course and a fall running back to the wall; dropping the finished level, or one step down with a channel drain along the threshold, fixes both. For the back garden, see patios in Bearwood. Weed in the joints or one settled corner by the gate is an afternoon with kiln dried sand, and we will say so rather than quote you a drive.
How it runs
Breaking out an old estate drive and relaying it
Thomas comes out and looks at the drive himself: where it has rutted or sunk, where the water sits, what the edges are doing, and whether a lorry can back onto it from the estate road. The written quote gives a line each to breaking out, excavation and muck away, the drainage, the sub-base, kerbs and edgings, and the surface you choose.
Most drives in Bearwood open straight onto the road, so deliveries and spoil go in and out without crossing a garden. We keep the pavement clear and sweep it every day, and the spoil leaves with us. A cracked drain, an old soakaway or soft ground found in the dig is photographed and priced for you first.
One council, BCP, is the planning authority and the highway authority for the whole job. Paving the front stays permitted development as long as rain soaks in on your side of the boundary, either through a permeable build or by falling to a border. Send more than five square metres of hard surface water onto the road and it needs planning permission, as Planning Portal guidance on paving a front garden explains. A new or wider crossing is a separate application, and it pays to start that before the drive is booked.
Cost
Why estate drives rut, and what fixing it involves
We price drives on what goes underneath, not per square metre. The old base. Many estate drives were laid on a thin layer of scalpings, which is why they rut where the car sits. The dig depth and a new, properly compacted sub-base are where your money should go, before the surface.
The clay. Bearwood sits on clay that shrinks, swells and holds water. We dig down to firm ground, and a geotextile membrane under the sub-base keeps the two apart.
Surface water. Water has to stay on your plot or reach a drain. Clay in Bearwood drains poorly, so a soakaway can fill and sit, and we plan for a positive outfall instead, with channel drains across a solid surface where needed. Water pooling against the house on this ground is a foundation issue, and Approved Document H covers where it should go.
Edges and bedding. Blocks creep when the edgings are not haunched in concrete, and they sit on a screeded bed of sharp sand that has to be the right depth.
Access. Most fronts here are open to the estate road, so a lorry can tip and load at the kerb, which is cheaper than barrowing everything through a gate.
Ask anyone else quoting what depth they are digging to, what sub-base goes in and at what thickness, where the surface water will end up, and whether the edgings are haunched.
If it is urgent
Standing water against the house, or a lifted block
If water is standing against the wall of the house after rain rather than draining off the drive, ring us and photograph it while it is there. On clay ground that is the one to act on.
Lifted blocks or slabs by the door and a gully that has stopped taking water are the other two worth ringing about instead of using the form. We make any trip safe on the first visit and get water moving away from the wall, and then we price the permanent repair. Booked work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. Phone if it cannot wait; a missed call gets a reply as soon as one of us is free.
The one local thing
The ground moves here, so the water matters more than the surface
The ground under Bearwood is cohesive and it shrinks and swells with the seasons. It gives up moisture and pulls in through a dry summer, then takes it back over winter. Under a lawn nobody notices.
Under a new drive it becomes your problem, because a drive is a large sheet that keeps rain off one patch of ground and pours it onto another, right beside a house whose foundations are not deep. Get that wrong and you are not looking at a puddle, you are looking at movement in the fabric of the building.
So the water, the ground and the trees get decided at the site visit rather than on the day. Where the water goes: Approved Document H expects a soakaway to sit well clear of the building, five metres out as a rule, and on ground like this it also expects a percolation test rather than an assumption.
Whether infiltration works at all: where it does not, the water needs a positive outfall to a surface water drain, and it may never lawfully go into the foul system. And the trees. The estate was planted when it was built, and those trees have been drinking out of that ground for decades. Taking a mature one out to make room for parking can let the clay swell back over several years, which is a slower and more expensive problem than the paving it made way for. If that is on your list, say so at the survey and we will talk about it before anything is dug.
Who you are dealing with
A firm you can look up before it digs your drive
Driveways in Bearwood are a 5 mile run from our Boscombe base, and we lay them across BH11 too, over to Kinson, Merley and Broadstone. BCP Council is the planning and highway authority. You contract with Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in Bearwood, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Its owner, Thomas Hannen, comes out to measure the drive and writes the price himself. A verified Checkatrade customer gave us 10 out of 10. The visit and the itemised written quote are free.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Bearwood?
Most repairs in Bearwood 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 Bearwood |
|---|---|
| Who decides | BCP Council is the planning authority for Bearwood. BCP Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Bearwood, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Bearwood. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Bearwood. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Bearwood
Most Bearwood homes are post-war. Does that change the paving?
Yes, a post-war house in Bearwood changes the level detail. Most homes here went up after 1945, about a third of them in the 1980s, so the walls usually have a proper damp course. A few older cottages remain, some of them listed, and those need their floor level checked first. Paving can come up to two courses below the door, with the drop used for a channel.
What it does not change is the fall, which still has to run water away from the house.
The only way to the back is through the house. Now what?
Then it all goes by barrow along a boarded run, or over the fence where a neighbour agrees. More than a quarter of the homes in Bearwood are terraced, so a back garden with no side access is a common starting point, and it is a planning problem, not a stopper. We sheet the floor, work in smaller batches and mix outside so nothing sets indoors. It costs time but does not make the job impossible, and that time shows as its own line on the quote.
Bearwood sits on clay. Does a soakaway work here?
Often it struggles, so it is tested before anyone relies on it. Bearwood clay drains poorly, so a soakaway can fill and sit, and where the test fails we plan a positive outfall instead. A test hole matters here too, because builder's backfill round an eighties estate house behaves nothing like the natural ground a few feet away. An hour with a pit and a stopwatch settles the design.
Who signs off a new opening onto a Bearwood road?
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council do, as highway authority, and the application is made by the householder rather than by us. They set the width, the construction and whether the footway can be crossed at all, given sightlines and whatever street furniture is in the way. We build to that specification and time our work around the date they give. Paving up to a kerb that never gets dropped is money spent on a garden path.
Is there anything worth checking before we call anyone out?
Stand at the pavement and see whether the edge course still runs straight, because a bowed edge means the restraint has gone and the surface will keep spreading. Then look at where water is sitting an hour after rain. Then push a screwdriver into a joint: in it goes easily, the sand has washed out. Most Bearwood drives are eighties work, and those three checks say whether it is a relay or a rebuild.
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Find out what your drive actually needs
A free visit in Bearwood, a few blocks lifted so we can see the base, and an itemised written quote.