Driveways and patios in Fordingbridge
Off street parking, block paving, resin bound, tarmac and stone patios across Fordingbridge and the SP6 villages. Free site visit, free written itemised quote.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
In Fordingbridge most driveway jobs start as a parking problem rather than a paving problem. Getting a car off the street is two pieces of work, not one: the crossing over the footway, which is the highway authority's decision, and the surface behind your boundary, which is ours to build.
The calls come in three shapes. A town house or cottage with nothing but the kerb outside it, where the front garden is the only place a car could ever go. An estate drive laid decades ago, tarmac or concrete, now rutted, cracked and holding water at the low end. And a back garden where the flags have rocked and sunk and the whole thing tips gently towards the house instead of away from it.
All three are worth a look before you commit to anything. The free site visit covers the ground and the geometry: we measure whether a car will actually stand clear of the pavement, open a trial hole to see what the sub-base is sitting on, and tell you honestly if the answer is that the crossing is not worth building. Then it goes into writing with the method on it as well as the figure.
The work
Front gardens, estate drives and riverside gardens
Front gardens turned into parking. The older streets of the town were built when nobody owned a car, so the terraces and cottages have a low wall, a gate and a few square metres of garden. Making that into a standing is careful work in a small space: the wall opened up and rebuilt or lowered, an edge restraint haunched in concrete, a proper excavation and sub-base rather than slabs on sand, and block paving or resin bound laid to a fall that keeps water off the pavement. Most of the material comes in by barrow because there is nowhere for a lorry to stand.
Around four in ten homes in Fordingbridge went up between 1945 and 1982, most of them in the 1970s and early 1980s, and those estate drives came with thin tarmac or bay-laid concrete that is now at the end of it: ruts where the wheels park, cracking along the joints, staining, and weeds through everything. Where the base is sound, resin bound or a tarmac overlay is the honest answer. Where it has failed we break out, dig to formation, lay a geotextile membrane and build a compacted sub-base, then surface. Shared drives get done in halves so both households keep a car on the road side.
Ground near the Avon. Gardens on the low ground either side of the river can be soft and slow to drain, and a drive built there needs more depth in the dig and a base built in thinner, better compacted layers rather than one thick one. It is also where we are most careful about levels, because a patio that raises the ground against an old wall is the fastest way to give a dry house a damp problem. Approved Document H is what the drainage design is set against.
Patios and paths are sawn or riven natural stone, porcelain and clay pavers on a full mortar bed, joints pointed, laid with a fall away from the building and kept clear of the damp proof course and the threshold. Steps get rebuilt where a garden drops, and a channel drain goes in at the door where the level cannot come down any further. A lot of this town has no room for a skip on the plot, and a skip standing on the highway needs a permit from the council, so we would rather muck away straight into a grab lorry on the day of the dig, keep the spoil off the pavement and sweep at the end of each shift.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
The quote is itemised: excavation, muck away, sub base, edgings, the surface and the drainage on separate lines, so you can compare it against anyone else's. Paving behind your own boundary is normally permitted development, subject to the front garden rule: more than five square metres of impermeable surface at the front needs planning permission unless the water drains to somewhere on your own land that can take it, which Planning Portal guidance on paving a front garden sets out. There are around fifty listed entries in the town, so if yours is one of them work in the curtilage needs checking first. New Forest District Council is the planning and building control authority for this address.
Cost
What decides the price of a driveway
No rate per square metre. What is under it decides more of the cost than what goes on top. A terraced cottage with a gate you can just get a barrow through, a semi on a shared estate drive and a detached house you could reverse a tipper onto are three different jobs before a spade goes in. On the low ground by the Avon the dig goes deeper and more muck leaves. Ask any quote how deep the dig is, what sub base goes in, where the water goes, and who takes the spoil.
If it is urgent
A trip hazard, or a drive that floods
Ring rather than use the form. A lifted slab, a sunken bay by a doorway or a gully that has stopped taking water will not wait. The first visit is about making it safe and getting the water going somewhere. Around Fordingbridge that is usually a slab rocking on a path somebody walks in the dark. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
Worth knowing
The crossing is a separate job from the driveway
This is the one that trips people up in a town with narrow frontages. The paving inside your boundary is yours to build. The bit between your gate and the road is the public footway, and driving over it without a proper vehicle crossing is not allowed however low the kerb looks. That crossing is an application to the highway authority, who will look at visibility in both directions, what is buried under the footway, whether there is a street tree, lighting column or gully in the way, and whether the pavement build-up can take a car.
They set how it is constructed and who may build it. Planning Portal guidance on dropped kerbs explains the process, and where the property fronts a classified road the access itself can need planning permission on top, which is the sort of thing the permissions that sit outside the planning system covers.
Before any of that, measure the garden. A car needs somewhere near five metres of clear depth to stand without its nose or its tail over the pavement, and a good many front gardens in the older streets here are shallower than that. If yours is, we will say so at the visit rather than take the work: a beautifully built standing that leaves your car hanging over the footway has cost you money and annoyed your neighbours.
Where the depth is there, two details are worth insisting on. The fall must run into your own ground, not out to the road, both because it is the rule and because a sheet of ice across a public pavement is your problem. And the gate has to swing inwards, or come off altogether, since a gate opening over a footway is a hazard to everybody walking past it.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We cover Fordingbridge and the villages round it, Sandleheath, Alderholt, Godshill, Hyde and Breamore, across the SP6 postcodes, and New Forest District Council is the planning and building control authority for this address. 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
Fordingbridge questions we get asked
Will a soakaway work in the ground here?
Usually it will, because the ground on this side of the River Avon is on the free draining side rather than heavy clay. It still gets tested rather than assumed. We dig a trial pit at the low end, fill it, and time how long it empties before sizing anything. Where it drains slowly we run a positive outfall instead, and the quote says which of the two we have priced.
Does the River Avon nutrient rule affect a driveway?
No. Fordingbridge sits in the River Avon nutrient catchment, but that rule bites where a scheme adds somewhere for people to sleep, so it lands on a loft conversion or an annexe rather than on paving. What does apply to a drive is surface water. If you are replacing a lawn with a hard surface, the rain that soaked in before has to be dealt with on the plot.
Our house is next to a listed building. Does that matter?
It can. There are 49 listed entries in and around Fordingbridge, from the Old Manor House to the road bridge over the Avon, and a listing covers the curtilage as well as the building itself. If your paving runs up to a listed wall, or you want to lift an old stone threshold, that needs consent from New Forest before a spade goes in. We flag it on the visit rather than afterwards.
What is on the quote besides the paving itself?
Excavation depth, the tonnage of stone going back in, edgings, the drainage detail and the disposal, each on its own line. Thomas Hannen measures and prices it himself on the visit, so the figures come from what he has seen rather than something guessed off a plan. If a section of the existing base is sound and can stay, that shows as a deduction rather than sitting hidden inside one lump sum.
Which part of an old drive gives out first?
The edges, almost always. A drive laid in the 1970s or early 1980s round here usually has no proper edge restraint, so the blocks or the tarmac creep sideways every time a car turns on them and the surface opens along the sides while the middle is still flat. That is why we price haunched edgings as a separate line, and why a relay without them will not last.
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Get a written price for your Fordingbridge drive
A free site visit, the garden measured properly, and an itemised written quote with the method on it.