Driveways and patios in Burley
Paving in Burley and the BH24 addresses around it, built for plots that open onto the forest and ground that holds water.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
A Burley drive has two jobs most drives do not: it has to keep its own surface out of the forest, and it has to look like it belongs at the front of a property inside the National Park. Both are decided before the surface is chosen, not after.
The usual reasons people ring from here are simple enough. The gravel has spread out across the verge and thinned where the car turns. A patio in a shaded garden has gone slippery and holds water in the low spots. Or parking has to be sorted out properly, because two cars on a soft frontage have churned it into ruts over a wet winter.
We come out and look at the whole approach: the entrance, the fall of the ground, what happens to rainwater now, and whether a machine and a lorry can get near the work. Then the quote comes back with the dig, the muck away, the sub-base, the edgings, the surface and the drainage on separate lines. The site visit and the written quote both cost nothing.
The work
Drives, parking and patios on plots that open onto the forest
Gravel, and keeping it inside the boundary. Loose stone suits the village, and a lot of the frontages here have no kerb line at all, so the drive simply merges into the verge and the stone travels: out onto the grass, down the lane and into the road. The build we use is an excavation to a firm formation, a geotextile membrane, a compacted sub-base and gravel set into a cellular grid, with a haunched edge restraint or a timber border defining where the drive stops. If your entrance falls towards the road, the last stretch is better finished in a bound surface so nothing escapes at all.
Drainage here is impeded, so infiltration is not the default answer: a soakaway needs a percolation test rather than an assumption, and on some plots it has to be a positive outfall instead. Permeable block paving takes the rain down through its own joints into the stone below, which suits ground that does not drain, and it repairs one bay at a time. Resin bound gives a flat, quiet surface with no jointing to empty and nothing to re-sand, and it will go over sound concrete. Both need real depth underneath here, and that depth is judged in the hole rather than promised in advance.
Parking for lets and visitors. There is a fair amount of accommodation and visitor parking in the village, and that is a different brief from a family drive: turning space so nobody reverses onto a lane, edges built to survive being clipped by somebody who does not know the plot, and a surface that can be patched without lifting everything.
Plots under mature trees stay damp, and paving in the shade grows a film that makes it slippery long before it looks dirty. Porcelain and natural stone both handle that better than a soft concrete slab, and all of them want a full mortar bed with a fall away from the house rather than five dabs and a hollow middle. Gutters and gullies fill with leaf litter here, so the outfall and the falls get as much thought as the paving itself. The finished level stays down off the damp proof course, and on an older cottage with none we keep a drained gravel margin along the wall. Spoil is priced openly: a grab lorry where one can stand, a skip where it cannot, barrow and small machine where a side gate is the only way in.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
Excavation, muck away, sub base, edgings, surface and drainage go on separate lines. Burley is inside the National Park and has its own conservation area, so the look of a frontage carries real weight and the National Park's heritage and conservation guidance is the place to start if you are changing it. The paving rule itself is about water rather than appearance: over five square metres, an impermeable front surface draining onto the road needs planning permission, while permeable paving or a soakaway inside your own boundary keeps it permitted development, and Planning Portal sets out where that line falls. A dropped kerb is a separate application to Hampshire County Council, and the Planning Portal explains what a dropped kerb involves.
Cost
What decides the price of a driveway
There is no honest rate per square metre, because what is under the surface decides more of the price than the surface does. A cottage on a lane where the lorry has to stay out on the road, a plot at the end of a long shared track, and a let that needs parking for three cars are three different jobs before anything is dug. On ground that drains this badly, the depth of the dig and where the water is allowed to go carry most of the price. Ask what depth, what sub base, and who takes the spoil away.
If it is urgent
A trip hazard, or a drive that floods
Phone rather than fill in the form. A slab that has lifted, a bay sunk by a doorway or a gully that has stopped taking water will not wait, because somebody falls or the water ends up against the house. Burley is about eleven miles from us and on the round, so a gully packed solid with leaves is normally looked at within a few days.
Worth knowing
A frontage that opens onto the forest needs an edge and a design
Around Burley a good many properties have no fence, no kerb and no obvious line where the plot stops and the open forest starts, and stock wanders across those verges freely. That has two practical effects on paving. Loose stone spreads across grazed ground and into the lane, which is a nuisance to everybody and a cost to you, since the gravel you paid for is now somewhere else.
And any surface that ends in a soft edge gets broken down by vehicles cutting the corner. So the edge restraint is not a finishing detail here, it is the part that keeps the drive alive: haunched properly, set on a line you actually want to defend, and taken right down to the entrance rather than stopping at the gate.
The other half of it is the design. Boundaries follow individual properties rather than the village sign, so the first thing worth doing is checking your own address on the National Park property map so you know what applies. Inside the National Park, and inside the conservation area, what a frontage is made of and how the entrance is formed both get looked at more closely than in an ordinary suburb, and gravel or a bound gravel finish sits far more easily than a black apron.
If your entrance has a cattle grid or a gate, tell us when you ring: it changes how we build the threshold and how the water is taken across it. The ground here holds water too, so Approved Document H matters as much as the design does, and a soakaway needs a percolation test rather than an assumption.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We cover Burley and BH24, out through Bransgore, Thorney Hill and Sopley and across to Ringwood, with the New Forest National Park Authority for planning and Hampshire County Council for the highway. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.
Questions
Burley questions we get asked
Does the Burley conservation area cover a gravel drive?
Appearance is what it controls, and a drive is very visible, so it can. Burley has its own conservation area and seven listed entries, and the New Forest National Park Authority is the planning body for the village. Renewing what is already down in the same material counts as maintenance. Swapping loose stone for a black bound surface across a whole frontage is a change, and worth asking about first.
Water stands by the gate all winter. Can that drain away?
Not into the ground unaided. Burley has impeded drainage, which means water arrives faster than the soil will accept it, and a stone filled pit becomes a pond with a lid. The usual answer is a positive outfall: falls set to move water to a ditch, a channel or a piped run that keeps working when everything is saturated. A timed pit test comes first so the design follows what the ground actually does.
How do you stop the gravel spreading onto the verge?
By binding the first stretch and holding the rest in. The few metres nearest the road get a bound or block apron so wheels turn on something solid rather than dragging stone out, then a proper edge restraint runs down both sides, then angular gravel goes in at a depth cars drive on rather than swim through. In Burley that also keeps the entrance reading the same as everything around it.
Our patio never dries out under the trees. Replace it?
Not necessarily. Shade and leaf litter keep a surface wet, and with impeded ground under Burley there is nowhere for that water to go, so it sits there and grows algae. If the slabs are sound and laid to a fall, that is a cleaning and repointing job. If they are flat, bedded on sand and rocking underfoot, water is getting beneath them and the fix is a proper bed and a fall.
Is there a time of year you would not start here?
Nothing here stops, but the ground dictates the sequence. On impeded ground a dig left open through a wet week turns to porridge, so we open one section, get the stone in, compact it and only then move along. Deliveries are planned around soft verges. If a finish needs a dry spell to go down properly, that part waits while the base work carries on underneath it.
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Tell us the address and what the drive or patio is doing now. We come out, look at the ground, the entrance and the access, and put an itemised written quote in your hands at no cost.