Driveways in Normanton

About Normanton

Normanton is Wakefield Council territory and has its own conservation area on the council's list, though most of the housing sits well outside it. What defines the work here is the industrial history under the ground rather than any heritage rule over it. The pits and the marshalling yards have gone, the enormous Victorian station was demolished in 1986, and a good deal of that land has since been cleared and built over. Haw Hill Park, roughly seventeen acres in the middle of town with its pond, woodland and pitches, is the green anchor that survived, and the streets around it are where a lot of our driveway and patio work happens. Normanton has become a popular place to move to because the housing is affordable and the transport links are good, which means a steady flow of people buying a house that needs the frontage sorting out. That is the job we see most often here: a tired concrete drive or a worn tarmac apron in front of a semi, and an owner who wants it done properly once instead of patched again. Red brick dominates here rather than stone, so brindle and charcoal block paving and tarmac are the surfaces that tend to sit right on a Normanton frontage. We price the work, do it ourselves and finish it before we move on, which matters more than it sounds when you are living behind the site for a week.

The houses we work on in Normanton

Normanton's older terraces, the rows put up for railwaymen and miners, have shallow frontages and often open close to the pavement, so on some of them a car simply will not stand clear. Where it will not, we would rather say so at the survey than take your money and find out later. The interwar and postwar semis, along with the estate housing that spread out through the second half of the last century, are the bulk of what we work on. Front gardens deep enough for a car, a boundary that can be opened up, and enough width for a double drive on a good many plots. Tarmac does well on these frontages, laid over a properly built sub-base with a block paved edge to hold it and give it a line, and it suits a long drive better than block paving does on cost. Round the back, fencing, a patio and a shed base are often part of the same visit. Along Castleford Road and out towards Altofts the plots get bigger and the drives get more ambitious.

The ground round here

This is old mining ground and it deserves to be treated as such. Normanton and neighbouring Altofts were colliery towns from the middle of the nineteenth century, and the Wakefield district still had thirty four collieries working when the industry was nationalised in 1947. The Coal Authority's Development High Risk Area covers a good deal of the town, drawn up from mine entries, shallow workings both recorded and probable, old mine gas sites and land that was once surface mined. None of that stops a domestic drive being laid, but it does explain the made ground, the occasional soft spot and the buried slab of something that turns up when the ground is opened. Underneath it all is the usual Coal Measures sequence of mudstone, sandstone and coal. We dig, we look, and we build up in compacted layers to match what we find.

Weather and drainage

Normanton is low lying compared with Ossett or Horbury and the land is flatter, so the drainage problem here is the opposite one. There is often not much fall to play with, and a drive laid a fraction too high at the threshold sends water at a front door that has nowhere else to send it. That is worth getting right at the setting out rather than rescuing later with a channel. The region lies in the Pennine rain shadow and is a good deal drier than the high ground to the west, but the wettest months are still November and December, when the ground is saturated and any surface with a lazy fall will show it. We set levels with a laser and check them again before the blocks go down.

Working in Normanton

• Block paving and sandstone are ours, and tarmac surfacing is laid by our partners, so a long Normanton drive can be costed for you both ways.
• No deposit is taken and the quotation is free, so getting a price out of us commits you to nothing at all.
• The same small crew is on site from the first dig to the last block. Tarmac surfacing is laid by our partners.
• Twenty five Google reviews at five stars, with tidy sites and minimal disruption among the things customers mention.

Normanton postcodes we cover

WF6.

Planning and dropped kerbs in Normanton

Both permissions run through Wakefield Council. The planning side follows the national Class F rule: a new impermeable front surface of more than five square metres facing the road needs planning permission unless it drains to a permeable or porous area inside your own boundary. Permeable paving, or a soakaway border, avoids the application altogether. For the crossing itself, Wakefield expects the drive to be built first, then takes a non refundable application fee before a highways officer visits, and it makes drainage a condition wherever the drive slopes towards the pavement, because rainwater running from a drive onto the public path is not permitted. Loose stone frontages need two metres of a different surface at the pavement edge to stop the stones migrating. A classified road frontage needs planning permission before the crossing application goes in. Fees are reviewed, so check the current figures with the council rather than with a contractor's website.

What we lay in Normanton

• Driveways
• Tarmac
• Patios
• Walling
• Steps
• Paving and paths
• Artificial grass
• Garden features