Driveways 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.
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Unlike most drives, one in Burley has to keep its own surface out of the forest and look as if it belongs at the front of a property inside the National Park. Both are decided before the surface is chosen, not after.
The usual problems in Burley 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 turning space 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 first, 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, not promised in advance.
Parking for lets and visitors. There is a fair amount of accommodation and visitor parking in Burley, 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, never five dabs and a hollow middle. For the garden side, see patios in Burley. 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
Building a drive that copes with forest rain and clay
Thomas walks the drive, looks at the levels, the ground and where the rain goes now, and prices it himself. His quote separates the dig, taking the spoil away, the sub-base, the edgings, the surface and the drainage.
Access decides a lot on a forest lane. If the lorry has to stay out on the road, aggregate comes in by dumper and the spoil goes out the same way, and we keep the verges and the lane clear for neighbours. Tree roots near the drive are dug round by hand, not cut through. The dig is fenced each night, the lane is brushed down, and the broken-out surface goes away with us. A failed soakaway, a buried drain or soft ground in the dig is shown to you, photographed and priced, before we go deeper.
A front surface over five square metres that sheds water onto the road needs planning permission; one that is permeable, or drains to a soakaway on your own land, does not, as the Planning Portal guidance on front gardens explains. On clay a soakaway may never drain, so Approved Document H and another outfall come into it. If the frontage is changing, start with the National Park's heritage and conservation guidance, and a new crossing needs a separate application to Hampshire County Council.
Cost
The part of a driveway price you never see
A Burley driveway has no honest rate per square metre, because what goes under the surface decides more than the surface does.
The ground. On clay that shrinks and swells, and drains badly, the sub-base has to be deeper and better compacted, and the water needs somewhere to go. That dig and its spoil carry most of the cost.
Access. A cottage on a lane where the lorry must stay on the road, a plot at the end of a long shared track, and a wide drive that takes a lorry are different jobs before anything is dug.
Drainage. Permeable block paving, gravel laid in a grid, or a sealed surface with a channel drain each need a different base and a different answer for the water.
Trees. Roots near the surface mean hand digging and sometimes a no-dig build-up, which changes both the method and the time.
Edges. Kerbs, edgings and any work at the entrance are priced one at a time. On a long shared track, the neighbours' way in has to stay open while we work, which shapes the order of the job.
Before you choose, ask each firm for the dig depth, the sub-base spec, the route for surface water and who removes the spoil.
If it is urgent
A sunken drive or a gully that will not drain
A lifted slab, a sunken bay by the front step, or a gully that has stopped draining gets worse over time, because someone trips or the water ends up against the house. Phone rather than using the form. Driveway work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
If you ring and get no answer, we will phone back as soon as we can. On site, the trip is made safe or marked, we clear a gully packed with leaves, and check whether the sub-base has failed. On clay ground, water pooling beside the house wall is worth sorting before winter.
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 makes the edges the weak point of any 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, not stopped 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 has to pass a percolation test before it is dug.
Who you are dealing with
Driveways across BH24, from the man who prices them
We lay drives in Burley and across BH24, out through Bransgore, Thorney Hill and Sopley to Ringwood. Burley sits 8.8 miles from our base in Boscombe. The New Forest National Park Authority deals with planning and Hampshire County Council with the highway.
Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Every drive is measured and priced by Thomas Hannen, who owns the business. Checkatrade shows a 10 out of 10 from a customer it has verified. The visit is free of charge, and so is the itemised written quote. Before you book a visit in Burley, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Burley?
Most repairs in Burley 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 Burley |
|---|---|
| Who decides | New Forest National Park Authority is the planning authority for Burley. New Forest National Park Authority's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | Yes: Burley Conservation Area. Check whether your street is inside the boundary before changing anything visible. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Burley. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | Inside the New Forest National Park, where design is looked at more closely and permitted development rights are narrower. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Burley
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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Get a price for your Burley drive or patio
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.