Driveways in Holton Heath
Drives, patios and paths across Holton Heath and BH16, rebuilt from the bottom of the hole up on ground that stays wet.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Last updated
Forty years is about the age at which the base under a drive gives out rather than the blocks, and about a quarter of Holton Heath's homes went up between 1983 and 1992, when block paving was the usual choice. That is why so many of these drives can be lifted, rebuilt underneath and relaid with the paving you already own.
On drives and terraces of this age the faults are much the same from house to house. There is a hollow where the car parks and it has started to hold water. The joints have gone grey and green and weeds are coming through them. Or the back terrace has dropped at one corner, rocks when you stand on it, and has crept up the wall behind it over three separate relayings.
None of those tell you anything on their own. We open a trial hole at the site visit, because the difference between a two day repair and a full rebuild is six inches down and nobody can see it from the pavement. Whatever the hole says, you get it in writing with the options priced apart.
The work
Older drives, and what forty winters have done underneath
Lift and relay of eighties block paving. Plenty of the housing here went up from the early eighties onwards, and block paving was the fashion of the moment.
The typical build of that period is thin: a shallow sub-base, a sand bed laid a little too generously, and an edge restraint along the house wall but nothing at all where the drive meets the lawn. The blocks themselves are usually perfect. We lift them, take the base back to a firm formation, put in a geotextile membrane, compact a proper sub-base in layers, then relay your own blocks with a haunched kerb round the whole perimeter and a full re-sand with kiln dried sand.
One hollow in a wheel track is a base failure in that spot, not a failure of the drive, and it gets opened up, the soft material out and the depth made good with compacted stone. Left alone it spreads, because the ground in Holton Heath is naturally wet and once water stands in a dip it softens everything around it. Weeds do not push blocks up either. They arrive because the jointing sand has washed out and left somewhere for seed to sit. Where a drive has both problems we say clearly which one you have and price them apart.
Concrete flags and tarmac of the same age. The paths and terraces that came with those houses are pressed concrete slabs on spots of mortar. They rock, they pond in the middle, and each time somebody has relaid over the top the level has climbed another course up the wall. We take them out, reset the level clear of the damp proof course, and relay on a full mortar bed over a compacted sub-base. For the back garden, see patios in Holton Heath. Older tarmac ripples and ruts where the car turns, and planing off and overlaying works only if the base beneath is sound.
How it runs
Digging out and relaying a drive on an eighties close
Thomas walks the drive with you, checks the levels and where rain runs now, and digs into an edge where he can to see what the old surface is sitting on. Plenty of drives in Holton Heath went down with the 1980s houses and bungalows, often over thin hardcore left by the builder. His quote shows each stage priced on its own: digging out, removing the spoil, the new sub base, edgings, the finished surface, and the drainage.
Holton Heath drives are dug out and laid under a single quote. The skip and the grab lorry stand on your plot where possible, the road is kept clear, and you are told the night before when the drive will be out of use. Spoil leaves with us. If we hit an old soakaway, a buried service or soft ground under the sub base, the job pauses while you look at a photograph and a price.
You can pave a front garden without planning permission provided the rain soaks away within your own boundary. Once more than five square metres of new hard surface sheds water onto the road, permission is needed, and the Planning Portal guidance on paving a front garden explains the rule. Ground here is wet and slow to drain, so we design for a permeable build or a proper outfall from the start. A wider entrance means a dropped kerb application to Dorset Council, and a listed property needs listed building consent first.
Cost
Wet ground, falls and edgings: pricing a new drive
What goes under a drive decides more of the price than the blocks or gravel on top. The layout. A bungalow with a single width drive to a garage, a detached house on an eighties close with a turning area, and a semi where the only way to the back is a shared side path each need their own approach. The shared path means barrowing everything, and the turning area means more edging and more falls to set.
The ground. The soil in Holton Heath is cohesive and holds water. A soakaway dug into it often fails to drain, so the water needs somewhere lawful to go from the start: a permeable sub-base and surface built to the guide to modular permeable paving, or a channel to a proper outfall. That is priced as its own item, not added later.
The depth of the dig. Old drives in Holton Heath are often a thin layer of concrete or blocks on sand over clay. Getting down to a proper formation, laying a geotextile and building up the sub base is where cheap quotes cut corners.
Edges. Block paving only stays put if the edgings are bedded and haunched in concrete. Without that, the blocks creep and the joints open.
Ask anyone else how deep they are digging, what sub base and how thick, where the surface water will go, and whether the edgings are haunched.
If it is urgent
A sunken patch by the door, or water running back at the house
Most drive problems are not emergencies, but some should not wait. A lifted block, a sunken bay by a doorstep or a gully that has stopped taking water is worth a call rather than the form.
On this ground, a hollow by the door or a drive that now falls towards the house gets worse each wet spell, because water held against the wall and the footings has nowhere to go. The first visit makes the trip safe and gets water running away again, even if that is a temporary channel. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. Ring us for anything pressing, and if we cannot pick up we will call back when we can.
The one local thing
Wet ground changes the build, not just the drainage
The ground here holds water. Open a hole in February and there will be water sitting in the bottom of it by the afternoon, and that fact changes the construction long before it changes the drainage design. You cannot compact stone onto a formation that is turning to soup.
Do it anyway and the sub-base pumps down into the subgrade over the first wet winter, which is exactly the drive you are ringing us about. So the geotextile separator is not optional here, it goes down first to keep the two apart, and where the bottom of the dig is genuinely soft the excavation goes deeper and a coarser capping layer goes in below the sub-base to bridge it.
It changes the water too. A soakaway needs somewhere for the water to soak to, and on wet ground it has least capacity in the month you need it most, so it wants a percolation test rather than an assumption. Approved Document H sets out how surface water should be dealt with.
Where the test fails, the honest answers are a positive outfall to a ditch or a surface water drain, or a permeable surface with a deeper open graded storage layer under it and a designed overflow route. A channel drain across the entrance keeps your run off out of the road, and keeping the water and the silt inside your own boundary is what SuDS actually means on a domestic drive.
Who you are dealing with
A registered company you can check before you book
Dorset Council deals with dropped kerbs, planning and building control for Holton Heath. The base we work from is in Boscombe, 10.7 miles away, and we cover the rest of BH16 too, out through Sandford and Organford to Wareham, Upton and Lytchett Matravers.
Our registered name is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. It is Thomas Hannen's firm, so the person who measures up and writes the quote is the owner. On Checkatrade, one verified customer scored the work 10 out of 10. Coming out to look is free, as is the itemised quote in writing. Before you book a visit in Holton Heath, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Holton Heath?
Most repairs in Holton Heath 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 Holton Heath |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Holton Heath. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Holton Heath, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Holton Heath. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Holton Heath. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Holton Heath
Can you lift and relay the blocks that are already down?
If they are a standard size and not spalled, yes. About a quarter of Holton Heath's homes went up between 1983 and 1992, and block paving from then is usually still sound. It is the base and the edge restraint underneath that have given up. We lift the blocks by hand, stack them, rebuild the sub base and the laying course, then relay the sound ones across the open areas and keep any spares for the edges.
The ground stays wet all year. Will a soakaway cope?
Probably not on its own. Holton Heath sits on naturally wet ground, so the pit can be standing in water before a drop of rain lands on the drive. We test it instead of guessing. Where the pit stays full we design for a controlled outlet instead, or a stone reservoir under permeable blocks that releases slowly, which stops the whole thing depending on the ground swallowing anything at all.
How do you get materials round to the back garden?
Down the side on boards, or over the lawn with a tracked barrow, which spreads its weight better than a wheel. On the flat plots around Wareham St Martin there is often side access wide enough for a small dumper, and where there is not, everything goes by hand and we allow for that in the quote rather than discovering it on day one. The grass gets covered before anything crosses it.
Is permeable paving actually necessary on this plot?
On wet ground it is less about the paving and more about where the water finally ends up. Permeable blocks over an open stone layer buy you storage, which matters when the ground itself is slow to take anything. The catch is that a reservoir with no outlet simply fills, so we either give it a slow release outfall or go for a conventional surface falling to a linear drain.
Who prices the job, and does the visit cost anything?
Thomas Hannen comes out himself, walks the plot with you and prices what he measures, and both the visit and the written quote are free. He owns the firm, so the person handing you the figure is the one accountable for it. The quote itemises excavation, base, edgings, drainage and disposal on separate lines, which lets you compare it properly against anything else you have been given.
Nearby, and next door
Driveways near Holton Heath
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Free quote
Wondering if your blocks can be reused?
Tell us the address and what you have noticed. We open a trial hole and leave you with an itemised written quote showing repair and rebuild apart. Both are free.