Driveways in Longham
Block paving, resin, tarmac and patios across Longham and BH22, with the sub-base and the drainage priced openly rather than hidden in a rate.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Last updated
The surface is the cheap part of putting a Longham drive right. What it costs is decided by what is under it and where the water is allowed to go. Most drives here were laid with the house and have simply run out of road.
Longham drives show their age in cracked concrete, sunken blocks and standing water. A concrete drive that went down with the estate has cracked across the bays and now lifts at the joints. Block paving from a later re-lay has sunk in the wheel tracks, gone green and grown weed through the joints. Or there is standing water where a car parks, and it has started creeping towards a doorway that sits barely above the paving.
We are only a few miles away, so somebody comes out, digs a trial hole where the wheels actually sit, and takes levels off the threshold. You get a written itemised quote with the dig, the sub-base, the edgings, the drainage and the surface priced apart.
The work
Bungalow frontages, old concrete and blocks that have dropped
The original concrete, and what to do with it. Six in ten homes in Longham went up between 1945 and 1982, with the peak in the late sixties and early seventies, and a lot of the drives are the ones laid when the houses went up, in bays with joints between them.
They fail in a pattern: the joints open, a corner lifts where a root has got under it, and the surface crazes and holds staining. Concrete is not a bad base and sometimes a new surface can go over it. But if the slab is rocking it comes out, and breaking it up weighs a great deal and costs more to take away than soil does. That is a line on the quote, not a footnote.
Levels at the door, which is a bungalow problem. Longham is bungalow country, better than a third of the housing, and on a bungalow the floor inside sits close to the ground outside. Over the years each new surface has gone on top of the last until the paving is level with, or above, the damp proof course. Then the wall inside goes damp and everyone blames the weather. The finished level comes down two brick courses below the damp course, or a channel drain and a gravel margin go in along the wall so nothing bridges up to the threshold. We measure that before we talk about surfaces.
The plots here are generous at the front, so a drive can usually be built to let you come out forwards rather than reverse into the road, and so two cars pass without one sitting on the border. Where the frontage has never been opened up, the dropped kerb is an application of its own to Dorset Council on the highway side, and it takes longer to come through than the drive takes to build. The ground holds water, so where the fall goes is settled at the survey, not assumed.
Where the sub-base was thin, a car finds it out: sunken bays and rutting under one wheel, kiln dried sand washed out of the jointing, and blocks creeping outwards because the edge restraint stops at the gate and the rest of the perimeter is lawn. A lift, a re-lay to the right falls, a re-sand and a properly haunched kerb deals with most of it. If the base was never deep enough, relaying the top just buys a season. Patios behind these houses are usually reached through a side gate, so the gate gets measured first; for that side of the work, see patios in Longham.
How it runs
A new drive on clay: how the job is run
Thomas comes out to look at the ground, the levels and where the rain runs now, and prices the job himself. Many homes in Longham are bungalows and detached houses on generous plots, so a drive here is often a long run in from the road with room to turn, not just one car's width.
His quote is split into the dig, lorry loads of spoil out, the Type 1 sub-base, edge restraints, the finished surface, and the drainage. Because this is shrink-swell clay, we dig down to firm ground, roll out a geotextile membrane where it helps, and compact the sub-base in thin layers. Spoil goes straight into a grab lorry or skip, the road outside is kept clean, and where the layout allows you keep a way in each evening. A soft pocket, an old soakaway or a buried cable found in the dig is photographed and priced for you before it is dealt with.
Relaying a drive where it already is counts as maintenance. Front hard surfacing of more than five square metres that sheds onto the road needs planning permission, and the Planning Portal sets out where that line sits. Permeable paving, or falling the water onto your own garden, keeps it permitted development, though on clay a soakaway may not drain. No conservation area covers Longham.
Cost
What goes under the drive decides most of the price
The ground sets the dig. Clay moves with the seasons. A drive on it wants a deeper dig and a thicker, well rolled sub-base than one on sand or gravel, and sometimes a membrane to stop the clay pumping up into the stone. That work is buried, and it is where cheap drives save money.
Where the water goes. Permeable block paving only works if the water can soak away below it, and Longham clay is slow to take it. The alternative is a fall to a channel drain and a proper outlet. Approved Document H sets out where surface water may go, and deciding this at the survey changes the build.
Size and shape. A long drive on a detached plot with a turning area is more digging, more muck away and more edgings than a straight single width, and curves take longer to cut.
The surface. Block paving, resin bound, tarmac and gravel in a grid all price differently, but the finish is usually a smaller share than people expect.
Access. A wide open frontage takes a digger and a lorry easily. A back garden reached through a side gate means barrows.
Questions for any other quote: what depth are you excavating to, and which sub-base material? Where exactly does the water go? Who takes the spoil, and is it in the price?
If it is urgent
A sunken bay or a drive that holds water
A drive rarely has a true emergency, but some faults should not sit. If a block has risen into a trip, a bay has sunk by the front step, or a channel has blocked and water is heading for the house, pick up the phone rather than the form.
On clay a dip that holds water gets worse each winter. Stand a cone or a pot over a trip hazard for now. The first visit makes it safe by lifting and relaying the worst of it, and finds out whether it is a local soft spot or the sub-base going. We do booked work Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. If you cannot get through, expect a call back from us as soon as we can.
Worth knowing
Wet ground, and why a soakaway is not the automatic answer here
The default drainage design on a new drive is to soak the water away on your own land, and on the low ground around Longham that is the design most likely to fail.
Ground that holds water does not take a storm from an extra parking bay as well as a dry sandy plot does, and a soakaway that cannot empty between downpours simply fills up and backs out at the surface, usually at the lowest point, which is often a doorway. Approved Document H is the document that governs it, and the honest way to size one is a percolation test dug in the wet half of the year rather than an assumption made in July.
What that changes for you is the order of the decisions. Before choosing between block paving, resin and tarmac, we work out where the water is lawfully going: into your own ground if it will genuinely take it, into a surface water drain if there is one and the owner agrees, or held in a deep permeable sub-base that releases slowly, which is the approach the SuDS guidance pushes everyone towards.
What it must never join is the foul drain, and it is not allowed to run out onto the road. If the test says the ground will not take it, we tell you before you have paid for a surface that depends on it.
Who you are dealing with
The firm laying your drive in Longham
Longham sits 4.7 miles from our base in Boscombe, and the patch we work takes in Hampreston and the BH22 roads up to Ferndown and across to West Parley and Wimborne, under Dorset Council. You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales with company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in Longham, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
The business is Thomas Hannen's. He measures up and prices the drive himself, so the person who quotes it is the person responsible for it. A verified customer's review on Checkatrade gives us 10 out of 10. Both the site visit and the written quote, itemised line by line, are free.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Longham?
Most repairs in Longham 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 Longham |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Longham. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Longham, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Longham. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Longham. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Longham
Bungalow drives here are wide. Does that change the base?
Mainly the area, not the build up. Around a third of the homes in the Longham area are bungalows, so the frontage is wide and shallow and the drive tends to be one open square, not a strip down the side. That means more edge per car and a lot of surface with nothing obvious to fall to, so drainage has to be designed as channels across it instead of one gully in a corner.
The drives on our road are all going at once. Why?
Because they went in at the same time. About six in ten homes in the Longham area are post-war, with the biggest share from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the drives were laid with the houses. They have had the same rain, the same frost and roughly the same number of cars, so the edge restraint and the joint sand give out within a season or two of each other along a whole street.
Where does the water go if the front garden all becomes drive?
Onto your own land, never the road, and that decides the design. Turning a soft front into a hard one removes the sponge, and on Ferndown ground already slow to take water there is nowhere for the extra to sit. So we either keep a planted border for it to soak into, use permeable blocks over a stone reservoir, or fall the surface back to a channel and a piped outlet.
Do you have to lift the whole drive to fix a sunken area?
No, a dip in block paving is nearly always a soft spot in the base beneath it or a washed out joint above a drain run, and both of those are local problems. We lift the blocks over a slightly bigger area than the dip, dig out what has failed, rebuild and relay the same blocks. The colour sits a shade off for one winter and then settles. Redoing everything for that is waste.
How do you stop the new drive sinking where the cars stand?
By building the base for the load rather than for the look. Wheel tracks and the turning point take far more punishment than the rest, so the stone goes in as compacted layers and gets whacked between each one, not tipped and levelled in a single pass. On these wide frontages it also means getting the falls right across the whole square, because water standing in the base is what softens it.
Nearby, and next door
Driveways near Longham
Nearby places we also cover for driveways, with straight-line distances from Longham, and the other trades we offer in Longham itself.
Driveways nearby
Our other trades in Longham
Driveways and patios guides
Driveway planning permission and where water goes Sunken or ponding driveway: base or drainage Indian sandstone vs porcelain paving: an honest comparisonEverything we do in Kinson Driveways, all areas Every area we cover
Free quote
Get a price for a drive or patio in Longham
Tell us the address and what the drive is doing. We will come and look at the ground, then put an itemised price in writing. Both cost nothing.