Driveways in Wareham
Drives and patios built to the right level on low ground, with the crossing, the falls and the drainage sorted before a surface is chosen.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Last updated
Where the water is going to go, and what level the finished job can sit at, come before any question about the surface on a town this low lying. We lay drives, front parking and patios throughout Wareham, and that is always where we start.
Wareham drive and patio work usually begins with a front garden, a sunken patio or a tired estate drive. A front garden on one of the old streets that they want to park on, where the pavement, the kerb and the neighbours all get a say. A back garden patio that has sunk, gone green and now holds a puddle for two days after rain. Or a drive on one of the estates around the edge of town that went in with the house in about 1970 and has finally given up, cracked across the middle with the edges crumbling into the borders.
We come out, dig a hole, look at what is under the surface and take levels off the house before anything is priced. On this ground the levels matter as much as the materials. If the honest answer is a repair, not a rebuild, that is what goes in the quote.
The work
Narrow streets, front garden parking and 1970s estate drives
Turning a front garden into parking. On the terraced streets in the older part of town the house fronts almost straight onto the pavement and there is nothing at the back to park on, so the front garden is the only option.
Nearly three in ten homes in Wareham are terraced, so it is a common conversation. The paving is the small part. Getting the crossing over the footway is the real job, because that is a highway application and the kerb work is done to their specification, not ours. The bay behind it wants a proper edge restraint and a haunched kerb line so the blocks cannot spread sideways, and a border kept back off the wall so rain has somewhere to go other than the brickwork.
Back gardens you can only reach through the house. A good number of properties here have no side gate at all, and the way in is a shared alley or the hallway. That changes everything about how a patio is built and what it should cost; for that side of it, see patios in Wareham. Every barrow of spoil and every pack of paving is carried, so we work in smaller lifts, board and sheet the route, and keep the muck away moving daily so it never heaps up in the garden. Where a grab lorry cannot get near it is a skip on the street with a permit, and the disposal goes on the quote as its own line.
Over half the housing in Wareham went up between 1945 and 1982, and the biggest single slice of it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those drives are almost all original concrete or thin tarmac laid straight onto whatever was there, and they fail the same way: a crack down the wheel tracks, rutting where the car turns in, and the surface breaking up at the garage threshold. If the slab below is sound, resin bound over it keeps the dig out of the equation. If it is moving, it comes up and the sub-base is rebuilt on a geotextile membrane, compacted in layers to a depth we set on site. Parts of the town sit in flood zones 2 and 3 with the Piddle a little over a hundred metres off, so where the water is sent is not a detail here. Out the back, Purbeck and other natural stone flags, porcelain on a full primed mortar bed, or block paving you can lift and relay: whatever goes down finishes clear of the damp proof course and falls away from the house, and where an old threshold sits too low we build in a channel drain rather than pretend. Steps get consistent risers. Repairs are worth doing on their own, and finding which single thing has failed is what the site visit is for.
How it runs
Laying a drive at a Wareham house, dig to finish
Thomas comes out, measures up, checks where the water will go and prices it himself. The quote lists excavation, muck away, the sub-base, edgings, the surface and the drainage separately, and you deal with one company for all of it.
A skip or grab lorry is booked for the spoil, the road is swept at the end of each day, and if the dig turns up an old soakaway or a buried service, work pauses while you get a photo and a written figure for dealing with it.
Many houses in the old streets open straight onto the pavement with no front garden at all, so a drive here usually means an estate house or a semi with space at the front. Dorset Council is the planning authority, and in the Wareham Conservation Area taking out a front wall to make the opening can need permission, and cutting back a tree needs notice to the council first. With so many listed frontages in town, check listed building consent before altering the front of a period house. Paving stays permitted development while the water stays on your land, and the front garden rule sets the limit for solid surfacing draining to the road. A dropped kerb is a separate application, and the slowest part, so we start it the week the job is agreed.
Cost
What goes under a drive decides most of its cost
The block or gravel you pick is the smaller part of the price. The ground and the water decide the rest.
The ground. Much of Wareham sits on clay that swells when wet and shrinks when dry. A drive on that needs a deeper dig and a thicker sub-base than one on free-draining sand, or it rocks and ruts within a few winters. We dig a test hole before quoting if the ground is in doubt.
Where the rain goes. Parts of the town near the river lie in flood zones 2 and 3, and on clay a soakaway may not drain at all. A permeable surface built to the government guidance on front gardens, or a channel drain to a proper outlet, is a real line on the quote.
Getting machines and spoil in and out. A semi with a narrow side path, a corner plot with two frontages and an estate house with a garage beside it all differ before a digger arrives. On the tighter roads a skip permit or a grab lorry may be the only way the spoil leaves.
Ask anyone else quoting how deep they will dig, what depth of sub-base goes down, and where they plan to send the surface water.
If it is urgent
A sunken drive, a lifted block or water at the door
A lifted flag, a sunken bay at a doorway or a gully that has stopped taking water is a phone call, not a form. Someone trips, or rain ends up against the house.
If water has come up through the drive or pooled at the back door, ring while it is still there, because where it sits tells us more than a dry survey. The first visit makes it safe with a temporary repair or a barrier, and the permanent work is priced once the ground can be opened. Planned driveway work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. When nobody picks up, we call you back as soon as we can.
The one local thing
Levels first: much of Wareham is in a mapped flood zone
Wareham sits low between its rivers, with the Piddle running within a couple of hundred metres of the built up area, and large parts of the town are inside flood zones 2 and 3 on the national maps. You can put your own postcode into the government flood service in a minute. What that means for a drive or a patio is simple and it is mostly about levels.
Every time you build up the ground outside a house you make the wall a little more exposed, and in a flood zone that is not a theoretical risk. So we take levels off the damp proof course before we design anything, keep the finished surface below it, and fall the water away from the building. Where an old back door already sits at ground level, the answer is a drainage channel across the threshold and a positive outfall, not another 50mm of build up.
The second thing it changes is the drainage design. Ground that is wet for much of the winter does not soak away on demand, and a soakaway dug in July in ground that looks fine can be sitting full of groundwater in January before a drop of your rainwater arrives. So it gets a percolation test at the depth it would actually sit, which is how Approved Document H expects it to be done, and it stays well clear of the foundations.
If the ground takes water, a permeable surface over an open graded sub-base holds the rain and lets it go slowly, which is the whole idea behind SuDS. If it does not, we say so and give the water somewhere to go instead, with the owner of the ditch or watercourse agreeing first. What it can never do is go into the foul drain or straight out onto the street.
Who you are dealing with
Driveways in Wareham and the villages round it
We lay drives in Wareham town and the BH20 villages round it, out through Stoborough, Sandford and Ridge. Wareham is 12.5 miles from our base in Boscombe and comes under Dorset Council for planning and highways. The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, number 15471719, registered in England and Wales. Before you book a visit in Wareham, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Thomas Hannen owns the business and measures up and prices each drive in person. A verified customer on Checkatrade rated us 10 out of 10. We do not charge for the site visit, and the written quote with every item on it is free too.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Wareham?
Most repairs in Wareham 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 Wareham |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Wareham. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | Yes: Wareham Conservation Area. Check whether your street is inside the boundary before changing anything visible. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Wareham. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Wareham. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Wareham
Our street is in flood zone 3. Does that block a drive?
No, flood zone 3 does not block a drive. Wareham falls within flood zones 2 and 3 with the Piddle running close by, but a driveway is not a building and needs no flood consent of its own. What it does need is a surface that adds nothing to the problem.
We set the levels so water runs to the garden instead of the door, use a permeable build up where the ground allows it, and avoid forming a hollow at the threshold.
How do you drain a walled yard in the old town?
With a fall and a linear channel, because there is nowhere to soak into. Terraced homes are 29.5% of Wareham and the yards behind West Street tend to be small, enclosed and lower than the lane outside. The ground here is naturally wet, so infiltration in a confined yard is not realistic. The paving falls to a channel across the full width and pipes to the existing gully at the lowest corner.
There are listed buildings all around us. Does my paving matter?
What matters is what you fix to the building, not the slabs. Wareham has 196 listed entries, and if your own house is one of them then drilling for a handrail, cutting a channel into the wall or raising ground against it needs listed building consent from Dorset Council. If the listed property is next door, your paving is your own business. We look the entry up before quoting rather than afterwards.
What do you dig to check before pricing the job?
A trial hole, every time, because the ground around Wareham holds water. It shows the depth of the existing make up, whether there is a slab hiding under the tarmac, how far down the soft material goes, and how quickly water leaves the hole. On an estate drive from the 1960s and 1970s cohort that dig usually finds a thin base laid straight onto soil, which explains the ruts where the wheels sit.
Where do we park while the drive is being built?
On the street, with some planning first. Parking in Wareham town centre is tight and the streets off West Street are narrow, so we agree in advance where the van and the grab lorry stand and keep one side of the road clear. Material arrives in bags rather than loose tipped where the frontage is short. If your only route in is a shared rear lane, the neighbours get the dates before we start.
Nearby, and next door
Driveways near Wareham
Nearby places we also cover for driveways, with straight-line distances from Wareham, and the other trades we offer in Wareham itself.
Driveways nearby
Our other trades in Wareham
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 Wareham Driveways, all areas Every area we cover
Free quote
Get a written price for your drive or patio
A free visit in Wareham, levels taken off the house, and an itemised quote with the dig, the sub-base and the drainage priced separately.