Tarmac restoration in Batley

Batley grew with the wool trade, and the money that came from it is still visible in the houses. Alongside the terraces that housed the mill workers there are larger stone villas set back from the road on the hillsides, with long drives, boundary walls and gardens that were planted a century ago and have grown up since. Those drives are the ones that give us most work in Batley.

We clean, recolour and seal tarmac driveways throughout Batley and the WF17 postcodes, with a lot of our attention on the long, shaded and tree-lined drives that this town is known for.

A long drive under tall trees

A short drive dries quickly. A long one, with trees along both sides, can stay damp from one end to the other for weeks in winter. Sunlight does the real work in keeping a surface clean, and under a canopy there is not much of it. The tarmac never gets a chance to dry, so algae and moss take hold and a damp film builds up on the surface.

The leaves make it worse. Wet leaves lie on the surface and break down, and the stain they leave behind is darker and greener than ordinary grime. Cleaning lifts it, and how to clean tarmac without damaging it sets out the approach. On a tree-lined drive the clean is only half the job, and we will usually tell you to cut back what you can to let in some light, because without it the surface is back to where it started within a season or two.

Roots, and what they do to a surface

A tree that has stood beside a drive for eighty years has a root system that reaches well under it. Roots lift tarmac in long ridges and open cracks that run in the direction of the root. A lifted ridge can be a trip hazard before it looks like much, and it is the one kind of damage that no surface treatment will fix.

What we do is tell you which you have. A web of fine hairline cracks is crazing, and recolouring and sealing handle that. A ridge or a bulge with a straight crack along it is movement from below, and a coating over it will split along the same line. In that case the lifted section is cut out and relaid first. Our note on potholes and crumbling edges shows the difference.

Villas, terraces and estates

Batley's housing falls into three bands, and the tarmac follows. The villas of Healey, Carlinghow and the slopes above the town have the long drives. The terraces nearer the centre mostly have a strip of hard standing at the front, if they have anything. And the estates built in the twentieth century at Staincliffe, Soothill and out towards Birstall have the ordinary family drive, one or two cars wide, which is where most of the colour fade shows up.

The estates are where recolouring does most good, because the structure is usually fine and the surface has simply weathered. Tarmac recolouring puts the black back, and sealing protects it. On the villa drives the question is nearly always the structure and the shade first, then the colour.

Gates, walls and gatehouse edges

Older properties often come with stone gate piers, boundary walls and a gate that has not moved in years. The tarmac runs up to all of them, and the joint between tarmac and stone is a weak point: water collects there, weeds seed there, and the tarmac pulls away from the stone as it ages.

We check those joints, and any step or lip where the drive meets a road or a pavement. If the edge has broken down it is repaired before any coating goes on, because the coating can only be as good as what is underneath it.

Working across Batley and Birstall

We cover WF17 in full, including Staincliffe, Healey, Carlinghow, Batley Carr, Soothill and Birstall. The map on our contact page shows the area we serve. Dewsbury is immediately to the south, Bradford to the north-west and Leeds to the north-east, and Wakefield, where we are based, is a little further on.