Block paving restoration in Dewsbury

Dewsbury is the centre of what used to be called the Heavy Woollen District, and the town still looks the part: stone-built mills, rows of Victorian terraced houses climbing the valley sides above the River Calder, and larger villas on the hills above the centre. It is steep country. Few plots in Dewsbury are level, and that is the most important thing to know about its block paving.

Many of the Victorian terraces here were built with no space for a car, and the drives that exist were made later, often by turning a small front garden into a forecourt. Those forecourts are small, sloping and wedged between a wall and a pavement, which is a hard place to lay block paving and a harder place to keep it.

Steep plots and where the water goes

On a hillside, rain does not sit on a drive; it moves down it. On a block surface that movement is a slow, steady scouring: the sand in the upper joints is carried a little further down the slope with every storm, until the top of the drive is bare and the bottom is packed solid. You can read a Dewsbury drive from the top of the slope like a map of its own rainfall.

Re-sanding the whole surface evenly puts the sand back where it was, but unless something changes it will move again. On the steeper plots we favour a polymeric compound that stays put, and we check that the foot of the slope has somewhere for the water to go beyond the pavement edge.

Turned-over front gardens and small forecourts

A forecourt made from a front garden is rarely deep enough for a modern car. The vehicle noses in tight, turns on the spot, and the same two or three blocks carry the load of every manoeuvre. Turning on the spot is hard on block paving, because the twisting scuffs the surface and shifts the blocks sideways.

The result is a patch of loose, rocking blocks where the wheels turn. Those are lifted and relaid with the bed firmed up; the rest of the forecourt is cleaned and re-sanded as normal. Left alone, one rocking block becomes six.

Savile Town, Thornhill and Earlsheaton

Savile Town, Thornhill, Earlsheaton, Hanging Heaton and Chickenley all fall within the postcodes we cover, and they are not alike. Some streets are Victorian stone terraces, others are interwar or later estates, and the first thing we check differs: on the old terraces the slope and the boundary; on the estates, the age of the sand.

Thornhill Lees, down by the river, sits on lower ground, and the drives there behave differently again: less scouring, more damp.

Shaded frontages and how often to clean

Drives on valley-side positions that stay in shadow through the winter are the ones to watch. Moss starts on the north-facing frontages first, and a shaded drive that is cleaned every couple of years is far easier to keep right than one left until the joints have gone altogether.

None of this needs to be an annual chore. Once the joints are properly filled and the moss has been treated, a block drive in Dewsbury can often go several years before it asks for attention again.