Driveways in Bransgore
Drives, patios and paths across Bransgore, Thorney Hill and Sopley, priced off what is under the surface rather than off a photograph of the top of it.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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If a Bransgore drive has dipped where the car stands, or the patio slabs rock when you walk on them, the surface is almost never the fault. It is the sub-base underneath, and that is the thing we come and look at before anybody talks about paving.
On Bransgore houses of this age the faults are soft tarmac, lifted flags and a settled patio. A tarmac drive that went down when the house was built has gone soft and started rutting where the wheels sit. A concrete flag path has lifted at a joint and somebody has caught a foot on it. Or the back patio has settled at one corner and rainwater now stands against the wall of the house instead of running away from it.
All three come back to the ground. On a free site visit we open a small hole in a corner of the drive and tell you whether what is down there can be kept or has to come out. That answer moves the cost far more than the choice between block paving and resin does, so it is worth twenty minutes with a spade before anything is written down.
The work
What Bransgore frontages usually need doing
Drives as old as the house. Half of Bransgore was built between the mid sixties and the early eighties, and plenty of those detached houses and bungalows still have the original surface: tarmac laid straight onto the dug ground, or concrete flags bedded on sand.
Tarmac of that age goes porous, then ruts where the car sits and breaks up along any edge nothing is holding. We excavate to firm formation, roll out a geotextile membrane so the stone cannot work down into the soil, and compact the sub-base in layers rather than tipping it in one deep lift. What goes on top is then a free choice.
The wide frontages here suit block, and on a front drive the sensible move is usually the permeable version, because the ground under Bransgore drains poorly and the water has to stay on your land. Blocks hold each other in place, so the edge restraint is the part that matters: a kerb or a block-on-edge border haunched in concrete, not bedded against a lawn and hoped for. Joints get kiln dried sand and a top up once they have settled. Weed through the joints and blocks creeping outwards at the sides is the restraint gone rather than the paving.
Resin bound gravel goes over a sound base and leaves no jointing to empty, which suits the longer drives out towards Thorney Hill. Tarmac is still the quickest way to cover a big area and takes a turning circle well. Concrete belongs where a horsebox or a tractor uses the entrance. Each wants a different depth underneath, decided at the survey.
Where the paving meets the house. Plenty of bungalows here have a patio off the rear, and the tired ones were usually bedded on five dabs of mortar with a void in the middle. Slabs, natural stone and porcelain want a full mortar bed, a fall away from the house and a finished level two courses below the damp proof course, or a step down or channel drain at the threshold where the ground will not allow it. For that work on its own, see patios in Bransgore. Ponding, a cracked bay, a gully that has stopped taking water and a soakaway that never worked are all jobs on their own, and the spoil is priced honestly, a grab lorry where one can stand on the lane and a skip where it cannot.
How it runs
Laying a new drive on Bransgore clay
Thomas comes out and walks the frontage with you. Most houses in Bransgore have a drive already, often a tired concrete or tarmac one from when the house was built, so the job is usually breaking it out and starting again.
He looks at the levels, where the water runs now, and whether the ground is soft. The written quote gives the dig depth, muck away, the sub-base, the geotextile membrane, edging, the surface, and the drainage as separate lines. The dig and the laying follow once you agree it.
Plots here are wide, so a small digger and a skip or grab lorry can usually work from the drive itself. You are told which days the drive will be out of use. The road is swept each evening and the spoil leaves with us. Soft clay, an old soakaway or a buried drain found in the dig gets photographed and priced, and the digger waits until you have seen it.
No conservation area covers Bransgore. A new front surface over five square metres only needs planning permission if it is impermeable and drains to the road, and Planning Portal sets out where that line falls. New Forest District Council is the planning authority. Widening or dropping the kerb is a separate application to Hampshire County Council, and the Planning Portal explains what a dropped kerb involves.
Cost
What decides the cost of a driveway here
The ground matters most. Bransgore is on clay that shrinks and swells, and it drains slowly. A drive on clay needs a deeper dig and more sub-base than one on sand or gravel, or it ruts and the blocks sink. The spoil is heavy and wet, so there are more loads to take away than the area suggests.
Where the water goes. To avoid a planning application the water has to stay on your land. On sandy ground a soakaway would take it. On clay a soakaway often fails its percolation test, so the design may need permeable paving over a deeper open-graded base, or a channel to a proper outfall. Approved Document H sets out the order of preference.
What comes out first. Breaking out an old concrete drive costs more than lifting gravel. Tree roots near the house are worth a look too, because they dry the clay.
The surface. Block paving, gravel with a stabilising grid, resin bound and tarmac all need a different base and edging.
The kerb. A new or wider dropped kerb is Hampshire County Council's work or approval, and a separate cost.
Ask any other quote how deep the dig goes, what depth of sub-base is going down, and where the water will go on this clay.
If it is urgent
A sunken block or water standing at the door
If a block has lifted or a section has sunk by the front door, mark it with a pot or a bin so nobody trips in the dark. If water is standing against the house after rain, clear the gully grate of leaves, which is often all it takes.
If it still will not drain, a phone call beats the form. Groundwork is booked Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm, and an unanswered call is always returned, as soon as we can get to the phone. The visit that follows makes it safe and get the water moving, lifting and relaying the worst blocks if needed. The permanent repair is priced once the base underneath has been opened.
Worth knowing
On this ground, where the drive sends its water is a structural question
The soil under most of Bransgore is cohesive and shrinks and swells with the seasons. It takes up water in winter and gives it back in summer, and the ground moves a little each time it does.
That is why a drive laid on a shallow bed dips in the wheel tracks after a couple of winters, and why a patio laid tight against the house can put water exactly where you least want it, which is down beside the foundation.
So the drainage design is not the last line of the quote here, it is the first decision. Where a soakaway is proposed it wants a percolation test rather than an assumption, because Approved Document H expects the ground to be shown to take the water, and clay like this often will not.
If it will not, the answer is a positive outfall to a surface water drain or a ditch, agreed before the machine arrives. It is also why we keep any soakaway well away from the house and finish the paving with a fall running off the building rather than towards it. None of that is expensive to build in at the start. All of it is expensive to add later.
Who you are dealing with
Who plans the dig on your drive
The business is Thomas Hannen's, and he comes out to look at the ground, the levels and the kerb before he prices a drive. From the base in Boscombe it is 5.6 miles to Bransgore, and the work covers the whole village, out along Ringwood Road and Thorney Hill Road to Neacroft, Waterditch, Sopley and Hinton.
Planning is New Forest District Council, and the highway is Hampshire County Council. The firm is registered in England and Wales as Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, company number 15471719. There is a 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade from a customer they verified. You are not charged for the visit, or for the quote that lists every part of the job. Before you book a visit in Bransgore, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Bransgore?
Most repairs in Bransgore 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 Bransgore |
|---|---|
| Who decides | New Forest District Council is the planning authority for Bransgore. The National Park boundary runs close by, and the Park's property map shows which side an address falls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Bransgore, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Bransgore. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Bransgore. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Bransgore
Why does water sit on the surface for days after rain?
Because drainage at Bransgore is impeded, not free. Water gets into the top of the ground, meets a layer it cannot pass through and backs up. A drive built on that without thought behaves the same way: the stone layer fills, the bedding stays saturated and the blocks start to shift under load. So we build with a drainage layer that has an outlet, instead of one that simply stores water it has no way of losing.
So is a soakaway pointless on a Bransgore plot?
Not pointless, but never assumed. A percolation test goes in at the spot where it would sit, because impeded ground varies inside a single garden and one corner can drain while another does nothing at all. Where the test fails, the design shifts to a positive outfall or to a tank with a controlled release. Building a crate into ground that cannot empty it moves the puddle underground and shortens the life of everything above it.
Our 1970s drive has broken up. Is the base salvageable?
Sometimes the stone is, and it is worth a look before more gets ordered. Bransgore is largely postwar stock, 51.4% of it built between 1945 and 1982, and drives of that age went down on a shallow layer of whatever was cheap at the time. If that layer is clean and thick enough it can be scarified, topped up and recompacted. Full of clay pumped up from below, which happens on this ground, and it comes out.
We keep hearing about the River Avon rules. Do they apply?
They do not bite on paving. Bransgore falls in the River Avon catchment, and the nutrient requirement is triggered by schemes adding overnight accommodation, so it bears on a new dwelling or an annexe and not on a drive or a patio. It gets quoted at people far more broadly than it actually applies. Surface water is the real constraint on a front garden here, and that is a question of where the run off ends up.
What keeps weeds out of the joints on wet ground?
Dry joints. Seed lands on every surface, but it only roots where the jointing material stays damp and holds a little silt, which is exactly what happens on impeded Bransgore ground when a drive drains slowly. Kiln dried sand topped up properly, or a polymeric jointing mortar over a surface that genuinely sheds water, keeps them out far longer than spraying ever will. Getting the fall right does more than any weedkiller.
Nearby, and next door
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Tell us the address and what you have noticed. We come out, look at the ground and the access, and put it in writing line by line. The visit and the quote both cost nothing.