Driveways in Wakefield

About Wakefield

Wakefield Council runs both the planning and the highway here, and the heritage layer is heavier than people expect for a working city. The council lists thirty one conservation areas across the district and a good number of them sit in or beside the city itself: Cathedral, Wood Street, Lower and Upper Westgate, South Parade, Wentworth Terrace, The Mount, St Johns and Wakefield Waterfront, with Sandal Castle and Newmillerdam on the southern edge. Article 4 directions are in force at St Johns and at Heath, which means permitted development rights have been withdrawn from named properties and work that would be automatic two streets away needs a planning application first. Finding out which side of that line a house sits on is worth doing before anybody orders materials. Away from the protected streets the constraints are ordinary and practical. Parking pressure squeezes the Victorian terraces, mature trees and hedges shape the interwar roads, and a great many frontages fall towards the pavement. Much of our custom in the city comes from recommendations from previous customers. We price the work and carry it out ourselves with no sub-contractors brought in, so the people who dig your drive out are the people who build it. Tarmac surfacing is laid by our partners.

The houses we work on in Wakefield

The Georgian terraces around St John's Square have shallow walled frontages and very little room to manoeuvre, so the useful work there is paths, steps and boundary walling rather than a full drive. Long Victorian rows at Eastmoor, Agbrigg and Alverthorpe are similar in spirit: a few metres of garden, a low wall and a gate, and a real decision about whether a car will stand clear of the footway once it is in. Interwar semis around Lupset, Thornes and Flanshaw are the sweet spot for block paving, because the front garden is usually deep enough for a car and wide enough to keep a planted border down one side. Postwar and modern estate housing at Sandal, Kettlethorpe and Newton Hill tends to have a drive already, so the question becomes replacement rather than creation. Lifting a cracked concrete strip, widening for a second car, taking the paving round the side to a patio at the back. We do all of that, and we finish one job before we start the next.

The ground round here

Wakefield sits on the Pennine Coal Measures, a repeating sequence of mudstone, siltstone, sandstone, seatearth and coal, and it has been dug into for centuries. There were around forty six small mines in and about Wakefield by 1869, and Manor Colliery on Cross Lane and Park Hill at Eastmoor were still working in 1982. Much of the district falls inside the Coal Authority's Development High Risk Area, mapped from mine entries, recorded and probable shallow workings, mine gas sites and old surface mining. For a domestic drive that rarely stops anything, but it does explain why made ground turns up where the age of the house would not suggest it. Down towards the Calder there is alluvium and river terrace material instead. We open the ground, look at what is genuinely there, and build the sub-base up in compacted layers rather than assuming.

Weather and drainage

This side of the Pennines is drier than people from the west assume. Met Office figures put average annual rainfall above 1500mm on the high Pennines and under 600mm in parts of the east coast, and Wakefield sits between the two, in the hills' rain shadow. The nearest station with published 1991 to 2020 averages, at Sheffield, records about 832mm a year across roughly 133 days with a millimetre or more, with November and December the wettest months and May the driest. That shape matters on a drive. The heaviest water arrives when the ground is already saturated and the daylight is short, so falls, edge haunching and a proper destination for the run-off are best settled in July rather than discovered in December.

Working in Wakefield

• Family owned and local. We are based at Crofton, so a Wakefield job is a short run for us rather than a diary problem.
• No deposit is asked for, and quotations and advice cost nothing, so you can compare us properly before you commit to anything.
• Once we start your drive we stay on it until it is finished, instead of disappearing to another job halfway through the week.
• Twenty five Google reviews, every one of them five stars, and much of our custom comes from recommendations from previous customers.

Wakefield postcodes we cover

WF1, WF2, WF3, WF4.

Planning and dropped kerbs in Wakefield

Two separate permissions can be in play. The planning side is national. Under Class F of the permitted development order, a new hard surface between your house and the road needs planning permission if it is over five square metres and impermeable, unless the water is directed to a permeable or porous area inside your own boundary. Permeable block paving, or a border that takes the run-off, keeps the job inside permitted development. The dropped kerb is a Wakefield Council matter and the order of work catches people out. The council expects the driveway to be built before you apply, charges a non refundable application fee of £171.36 plus a contribution fee, and requires drainage where the drive falls towards the pavement, since rainwater running onto the public path is not allowed. Loose stone frontages need two metres of a different surface at the footway edge. Properties on a classified road need planning permission before the crossing application goes in. Fees and rules are reviewed, so confirm the current position with the council.

What we lay in Wakefield

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