Block paving restoration in Ossett

Ossett is a market town on a hill a few miles west of Wakefield, with a town hall at its centre and a reputation as a well-kept place. The housing is mainly interwar and later, with larger detached and semi-detached houses on the roads out towards Gawthorpe and Healey. It is a town of front gardens and driveways, which makes it one of the easiest places to see how block paving is really used.

Most drives in Ossett went down between the 1980s and the early 2000s, laid by people who wanted off-road parking for two cars. They tend to be wider than the drives in the terraced towns nearby, they have a lawn or border on one side, and they are often bounded by hedges. Hedges are the clue.

Hedges, borders and what falls from them

A drive that runs alongside a hedge or a planted border gets a constant slow supply of debris: clippings, berries, seed, petals and the fine soil that works out of a border in rain. Every bit of that ends up in the joint. Moss and weeds then follow the line of the hedge, and on an Ossett drive you can often see a green stripe on the side nearest the planting while the far side is clear.

That tells us where the work is. The far side may only want a clean; the near side wants the joints opened out and refilled, and a polymeric fill is worth considering there because it resists seed settling in.

Wide drives, and where the load goes

A wide drive spreads out the cars, but not the load. Two cars park in the same two places every night and turn in the same arc each morning. The first sign is two shallow tracks in the bedding, with the joints in the tracks scattered or empty.

Because Ossett drives are wide there is a lot of surface that is hardly used, and it looks fine, which can hide the fact that the tracks have begun to sink. We pay particular attention to the line the wheels take, and we lift and relay those strips before refilling the joints.

Gawthorpe, Healey and the Wakefield side

Gawthorpe, Healey, Southdown and Flushdyke are all part of the WF5 postcode. Ossett also borders Horbury and Wakefield, so streets at the edges of the town blur into the next place along, and we treat them in the same way.

The older houses nearer the centre are stone-built and often have no drive at all. The block paving is on the roads that grew outwards from there.

Maintenance, not rescue

Because Ossett drives are generally in good order, the work here is often maintenance rather than rescue: a clean and re-sand before the weeds have fully taken hold. Done at that stage it is a short job, and the original blocks look much as they did on the day they were laid.

The drives that take the most putting right are the ones left for fifteen years. A clean and re-sand every so often is the lighter end of the work.