Driveways in Ossett

About Ossett

Ossett falls under Wakefield Council, and the town centre carries one of the district's thirty one conservation areas, so materials and boundary treatment are worth checking on the older streets before anything is ordered. The town's money came from wool, and specifically from shoddy and mungo, the trade that pulled old woollens apart and spun them back into cloth. Ossett sat at the heart of that alongside Batley, Heckmondwike and Dewsbury, and the surviving mills, the stone terraces and the pairs of cottages on roads like Haggs Hill Road are what the industry left behind. What that means for us is stone. A great deal of Ossett is built from sandstone quarried close by, at Storrs Hill and other faces along the ridge, and a red or dark grey drive laid tight against a honey coloured gable can look wrong however well it has been laid. So we tend to put buff or silver grey sandstone at the back of a stone house and keep the brindle blocks for the brick frontages, or run a sandstone border round a block paved drive so the two materials meet on purpose. Boundary walls matter here too. Plenty of Ossett frontages are defined by a low stone wall, and opening a section for a drive is a walling job as much as a paving one. We build the walls ourselves rather than bringing anybody else in to do them.

The houses we work on in Ossett

Frontages in Ossett tend to be broad and shallow rather than long, which shapes the answer more than anything else does. On the older stone terraces near the Market Place there is often only a yard or two between the wall and the front door, so the work is a path, a step or two and tidy edges rather than a car. Move out to the Victorian and Edwardian streets and the gardens begin to take a small car, though usually only if the boundary wall is opened up properly and the levels are reworked at the same time. The interwar and postwar semis towards Gawthorpe, Healey and South Ossett are where most of our driveway work happens, with room for a double width drive and, on the wider plots, enough space to turn so nobody has to reverse out onto the road. Newer estate housing round the edges normally arrives with a drive already down, and comes to us for replacement, widening, or a path taken round to a patio in the back garden.

The ground round here

Ossett stands on the Coal Measures like its neighbours, sandstones and mudstones with coal seams running between them, and the ground has been worked for both. The stone that built the town came out of quarries on the doorstep, and the coal underneath brought the pits that employed the other half of it. Two things follow on a domestic job. Made ground turns up on plenty of plots, particularly near former mill and colliery sites, so dig depths vary and soft spots get taken out and made good rather than bridged with extra stone. And bedrock can sit shallower than you want on the higher ground, which is the sort of surprise that changes a price if it has not been proved first. We would rather open a trial hole at the survey than tell you something unwelcome once the drive is half dug.

Weather and drainage

Ossett sits a little higher than Wakefield and it feels it, particularly in a wet westerly. The district as a whole lies in the rain shadow of the Pennines and takes nothing like the rainfall of the high ground to the west, but late autumn and winter still carry the bulk of what does fall. On a shallow, wide frontage the practical consequence is that water has nowhere sideways to go, so it heads for the door threshold or the pavement. We set the finished level well below the damp course, fall the surface away from the house, and give the run-off a proper destination inside your own boundary rather than trusting a single channel drain to cope on its own.

Working in Ossett

• We build the walling as well as the paving, so an Ossett frontage with a stone wall stays one trade and one price.
• Sandstone and block paving are laid by us, and tarmac surfacing by our partners, so materials can be mixed on a single job.
• Free quotations and free advice, no deposit taken, and full public liability insurance sitting behind the work.
• Much of our Ossett custom comes from recommendations from previous customers.

Ossett postcodes we cover

WF5.

Planning and dropped kerbs in Ossett

Ossett is Wakefield Council for planning and for the highway alike. The national rule applies as it does everywhere in England: a new impermeable hard surface over five square metres between the house and the road needs planning permission unless the water drains to a permeable area within your own curtilage, so permeable block paving or a border to soak into keeps the job inside permitted development. For the dropped kerb, Wakefield Council wants the driveway finished before the application goes in, takes a non refundable fee upfront, and will not approve a crossing where the run-off would reach the public footway. If the frontage is on a classified road, planning permission has to be granted before the crossing application is even made, which adds weeks to the timeline. Trees, lighting columns and manhole covers in the way are the applicant's problem and the applicant's cost, not the council's. We will give you our view at the survey on whether a crossing looks realistic.

What we lay in Ossett

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