Driveways in Three Legged Cross
Estate block paving lifted and relaid on a corrected base, cracked garage aprons recast and patios that pond finally drained, across Three Legged Cross and BH21.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Last updated
Most of the block paving in Three Legged Cross went down with the estates, which puts a lot of it somewhere between twenty and forty years old. That is exactly the age at which the joints empty, the edging gives way and the wheel tracks start to dip. Nearly all of it can be lifted and relaid on a corrected base with the blocks you already own, and that is usually a far better buy than a new surface on the same tired ground.
Paving around Three Legged Cross fails as spreading drives, cracked garage aprons and back patios that hold water. A drive that has spread sideways and dropped where the car stands, with weed in every joint. A concrete apron at a garage that has cracked and lifted, often over a root, so the door no longer clears it. And a back garden patio that holds water for two days after rain, because the ground it was laid on does not drain and nobody gave it anywhere to go.
None of those is a disaster and none needs a salesman. We come out, lift a block or dig a small hole, and tell you whether you are looking at a repair, a relay or a rebuild. The visit costs nothing, the written itemised quote costs nothing, and if the answer is that a re-sand and some new edging will see you right, that is what the quote will say.
The work
Estate drives, garage aprons and extra parking
Relaying block paving is the usual fix for a tired drive in Three Legged Cross. The blocks rarely wear out. What fails is the kiln dried sand washing out of the jointing, which lets the blocks work loose, and the edge restraint giving way, which lets the whole field of paving creep outwards.
Once it is loose, the wheel tracks start rutting and weed takes the open joints. We lift the blocks by hand and stack them, dig to a firm formation, rebuild a compacted sub-base, reset the edgings haunched in concrete, then screed and relay. The same blocks go back, turned where the sun has faded them.
Concrete drives and garage aprons. The older bungalows in Three Legged Cross mostly came with concrete, and after fifty years it cracks along the day joints and lifts where a root has found its way under. The awkward part is nearly always at the garage door, where the slab has risen and the door will not clear it, or dropped so water runs inside. That corner gets cut out, the ground beneath dealt with, and a new section cast to the right level with a channel drain across the threshold. Where the rest is sound we leave it and say so.
Extra parking usually follows something else changing: a garage converted, a second car, a grown up family. It all turns on whether the edging and the crossing already exist and where the extra water goes, since making more ground hard on soil that stays wet is not a free move. A new or wider vehicle crossing is a dropped kerb application to Dorset Council as highway authority. Plenty of these gardens are level, which sounds like an advantage and is not, because a flat patio on ground that holds water simply ponds, so we build a positive fall away from the house and pick up the low edge with a channel drain. Flags, natural stone or porcelain, go on a full mortar bed so the surface does not settle into hollows and start staining. For the patio itself, see patios in Three Legged Cross.
How it runs
Digging out and laying a new drive, stage by stage
Thomas Hannen comes out, measures up, looks at the levels and where the water goes now, and prices it himself. Many drives in Three Legged Cross are the original concrete or tarmac from when the estate was built, cracked and sunk in places. The quote is itemised: excavation, muck away, the sub-base, edgings, the surface, and drainage.
Digging out and laying the drive are priced together on one written quote. Most plots have room for a small digger and a grab lorry at the kerb. We keep your access clear as much as we can, the road is swept, and spoil leaves by grab lorry, not tipped. An old soakaway or a buried pipe found in the dig gets photographed and priced, and waits for your go ahead.
Paving your own front garden is normally permitted development, and the test is water, not area. Anything over five square metres has to be permeable or drain to a lawn, border or soakaway inside your boundary, which the front garden paving rules set out. Send it into the road and it needs planning permission. On ground that stays wet, water pooling by the house is a damp question too, so we plan the falls away from the walls. Dorset Council covers planning and the highway, and a new dropped kerb is its own application.
Cost
What is under a drive decides most of its price
No rate per square metre, because the surface is only the last layer. The ground. The soil here is wet, sandy heathland ground with a high water table in winter, so a drive needs a proper depth of sub-base on a membrane to stop the stone mixing into the sand. A soakaway has to pass a winter percolation test, and a permeable surface may need a drain to take the water off.
What is coming out. Breaking out the old concrete or tarmac and taking it away is priced by the load. Old concrete from the seventies can be thick and reinforced.
Getting a machine to it. A drive a tipper can reverse straight onto is the quick end. A close where the lorry has to stand on the turning head, or a rear parking area reached down a side path, takes longer, and anything a machine cannot reach goes by barrow.
The surface. Block paving, resin bound, tarmac and gravel all price and drain differently, and edgings, steps and gullies are lines of their own.
Before signing, ask how deep they will dig, what sub-base and membrane go down, and where the surface water will end up.
If it is urgent
A sunken drive, a lifted block or water by the door
Ring us instead of using the form. A drive is rarely an emergency, but a sunken patch by the front door, a lifted block someone can trip on, or a gully that has stopped draining will not get better.
Water standing against the house matters more here, because the ground is already wet for much of the winter. Tell us if it is pooling by a wall. The first visit looks at why it has sunk, puts right any trip hazard, and gets water flowing away from the house, then we price the proper repair. We book in work Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. A missed call gets a call back as soon as we can.
Worth knowing
The ground here does not take water away
Three Legged Cross sits on naturally wet ground, and that one fact should drive the whole design of a drive or a patio here rather than being an afterthought at the end. A soakaway is the default answer everywhere else in the country.
Here it is a question, not an answer. A hole dug in August can look like it will swallow anything, and the same hole in February can be standing full of water before you have finished digging it, at which point it takes nothing at all and the drive it was meant to serve floods every time it rains hard.
So it gets proved rather than assumed: a trial hole and a percolation test, sized on what the ground actually accepts, and kept well away from the house so a full soakaway is never sitting against a foundation. Approved Document H is the standard that sits behind that, and it is why we would rather spend an hour with a spade at the survey than guess.
What that means in practice is usually good news, because the answer is often to stop trying to get rid of the water quickly. A permeable build up, where an open graded stone sub-base holds the water and lets it out slowly, is what planners mean by SuDS and it works on ground like this where a single deep hole does not. Keeping a lawn, a gravel border or a planted strip alongside the hard surface gives the run off somewhere to go, and it is cheaper than any drainage you can buy.
Where the ground genuinely will not take it, the honest answer is a positive outfall to an existing surface water drain, agreed before the job starts. What is not an option is sending it over your boundary or out onto the road, which is a complaint from a neighbour or the highway authority waiting to happen and is the one part of this that costs money twice.
Who you are dealing with
Driveway work in BH21, nine miles from our base
We lay drives in Three Legged Cross, Verwood, West Moors, Ashley Heath and the BH21 roads out towards Ringwood, all about nine miles or so from our base in Boscombe. Dorset Council handles planning and the highway. Send your postcode if you want to be certain.
The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, and it is Thomas Hannen's. He measures up and sets the price himself. A verified customer gave us 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. Looking at the job and quoting in writing, line by line, are both free. Before you book a visit in Three Legged Cross, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Three Legged Cross?
Most repairs in Three Legged Cross 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 Three Legged Cross |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Three Legged Cross. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Three Legged Cross, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Three Legged Cross. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Three Legged Cross. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Three Legged Cross
The block paving is uneven and full of weeds. Full relay?
Only if the base has gone. Weeds root in the joints of any block drive once the sand has washed out, and that is a re-sanding job rather than a rebuild. Uneven is a different signal: if the dips follow the wheel lines, the ground under them has consolidated and no amount of sand touches it. A lot of drives at Three Legged Cross went down in the seventies and early eighties with very little stone beneath them.
Can we re-sand it ourselves and leave it at that?
You can, and on a drive that is only weedy that is the right call. Brush the joints out, wash it down, let it dry properly, then work kiln dried sand in and vibrate it, or at least tamp it. What ruins a drive is jetting hard enough to blow the bedding out from under the blocks, which turns a flat surface into a rippled one. If it dips again inside a season, the trouble is underneath.
Should new paving drain into the border by the wall?
No, the ground at Three Legged Cross is naturally wet sand with a high winter water table, so sending run off from a paved area into a border tight against the building loads that corner with water it cannot shed. That is a damp question, not a decorating one. We fall the paving away from the wall into a channel on the outer edge and take it to a drain or an infiltration point well out in the garden.
We want a car port over the new hardstanding. Any problem?
The paving is not the issue, the thing standing on it might be. Three Legged Cross falls inside the green belt, which makes no difference to resurfacing but starts to matter once you put up something with a roof. Check it with Dorset before the base goes in, because a car port wants foundations and drainage designed into the slab from the beginning rather than added under a drive that was never built for it.
How many days is a relay, start to finish?
A straightforward one runs to a few days: lift and stack the blocks, correct the base, relay, joint and compact. What stretches it is finding the base has to come out, or waiting on matching blocks to replace the ones that broke coming up. Three Legged Cross is nine miles from our base, so these are full days on site, and you get told which morning the cars need to be off.
Nearby, and next door
Driveways near Three Legged Cross
Nearby places we also cover for driveways, with straight-line distances from Three Legged Cross, and the other trades we offer in Three Legged Cross itself.
Driveways nearby
Our other trades in Three Legged Cross
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 Verwood Driveways, all areas Every area we cover
Free quote
Get a written price for your Three Legged Cross drive
Send the postcode and tell us what the paving is doing. We come out, lift a block to see the bed underneath, and put the price in writing with the days it will take.