Driveways in Canford Cliffs

Drives to the detached houses. Plenty of the houses in Canford Cliffs sit well back from the road on large plots, so the drive is long, often with a turning area at the top and a gate at the bottom.

Loose gravel suits the Canford Cliffs setting and drains freely, but it needs a firm edge restraint and a proper compacted base or it ruts. Resin bound gravel gives the same look without loose stone and is permeable. Block paving and tarmac are harder wearing where cars turn, as long as the water has somewhere to go.

Drives lifted by roots. Mature pines and other big trees are part of the character of Canford Cliffs, and their roots heave tarmac and block paving over time. We will not just cut through a main root to get a level surface. Near a tree we dig by hand, and where the roots are shallow we build up instead of down, using a no-dig cellular base over a geotextile membrane so the ground under the tree is not compacted. If the tree is in the conservation area or has a preservation order, the council has to be told before any work to it.

Car parks at blocks of flats. A lot of the homes in Canford Cliffs are flats, and a shared car park that nobody has touched since it was laid is common. That work is best done in one go: the whole area dug to a consistent depth, new kerb lines haunched in concrete, one fall across the surface, and a channel drain across the entrance or at the low end so the ponding stops. We write the quote so it can go to the freeholder or managing agent and, where leaseholders share the cost, out with a section 20 notice.

Rebuilding the base. A Canford Cliffs drive that rocks underfoot or has sunk in the wheel tracks comes out. The formation is cut back, the membrane goes down and the sub-base goes in compacted layers to a depth that suits what will drive on it. What goes on top matters much less than this.

Repairs. A sunken bay by the gate, blocks that need lifting and relaying, weed through open joints, a drive that needs a clean and a re-sand with kiln dried sand, or a gully choked with needles. If it only needs that, we will not quote you a new drive.

One person to ring from the first visit to the last. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: excavation, muck away, the sub base, edgings, the surface itself and the drainage on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.

Nothing is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day rather than the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.

Paving a front garden is permitted development for a house if the surface is permeable or drains onto your own ground; more than five square metres of sealed surface running to the road needs planning permission, as the Planning Portal guidance on paving your front garden explains. Flats have no permitted development rights for hard surfacing, so a block's car park is a planning question as well as the freeholder's decision. A new or wider entrance onto the road needs a dropped kerb application to BCP Council, and parts of Canford Cliffs are in a conservation area, so check the council's conservation area list before a boundary changes.

Ring rather than use the form. A lifted slab, a sunken bay by a doorway or a gully that has stopped taking water are the ones that will not wait, because somebody falls or water ends up against the house.

The first visit is about making it safe and getting the water going somewhere, and we quote the permanent work once the ground can be opened up. With so many pines about, check the gully or channel grating first: needles block them fast, and a cleared grating sometimes turns out to be the whole fix. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.

Call now: 07435 839745

Two conservation areas cover parts of Canford Cliffs: Canford Cliffs Village, around Haven Road, and Branksome Park and Chine Gardens, which takes in a large part of the suburb. The council's list shows where the boundaries run.

In the Branksome Park area, the council's own appraisal is clear that planting, not hard landscaping, should dominate a frontage. It asks for boundary hedges to carry on into the mouth of a new or widened entrance, gate piers set back from the footway and gates of an open design. It also records extra controls on gates and walls along many of its frontages, and it expects the informal gravel surfaces on unmade private roads to be kept. Surfacing one of those roads in tarmac needs planning permission.

None of that stops you having a good drive in Canford Cliffs. It changes the plan. We keep the hedge and the pines where they are, set the entrance out the way the council expects, and suggest a bound gravel or a muted permeable block rather than a bright one. Ask before a hedge, a wall or a tree comes out, not after. We put the photographs, a simple plan and the materials together with the quote, so any application is ready to go.

Nearby places we also cover for driveways, with straight-line distances from Canford Cliffs, and the other trades we offer in Canford Cliffs itself.

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