Tarmac restoration in Pontefract

Pontefract is an old town, and its driveways show it. The centre is a market town with a medieval castle on the rock above it, Georgian and Victorian streets running out from the market place, and a ring of interwar and postwar estates beyond. A tarmac drive in the older streets is rarely the first surface to have been put down in that spot, and that history is what decides what it needs now.

We clean, recolour and seal tarmac driveways and private access roads in Pontefract and the villages around it. Every surface is looked at on its own merits, and what we recommend depends on what is actually underneath the grey.

A drive that has been resurfaced before

On a street that has been built up for a few hundred years, tarmac tends to be a layer on top of an earlier layer. Drives get overlaid when they wear out, and each overlay adds to the depth. After two or three of them the surface can sit proud of where it started, with the edge now level with the damp-proof course, the water running towards the house instead of away from it, and the gully at the bottom sitting a little higher than the tarmac around it.

None of that is fixed by a coat of black, and it is worth knowing before anyone puts one on. If water now collects against a wall or a door, the first job is to look at the fall of the drive and where the water is going. Recolouring restores the colour and closes the surface; it does not change a level. Our note on crumbling edges and potholes covers the damage that comes from old surfaces failing at the edges.

Old surface, old binder

The older the tarmac, the less bitumen is left in the top of it. The binder is what makes a new drive black, and sunlight and rain take it away slowly, so the stone underneath shows through as grey. An old drive in Pontefract that has been through forty or fifty winters can look finished while still being sound, and the reverse is also true: a drive that looks acceptable from the window can be crumbling at the edges.

That is why we look at the edges, the joins where one resurfacing met another, and any cracks you can get a fingertip into before we talk about colour. Why tarmac fades to grey sets out what is happening to the surface, and what recolouring actually does explains what putting binder back can and cannot change.

Mature trees, old walls and little sun

The older parts of the town have mature trees and tall boundary walls, and both keep sunlight off the ground. A drive that gets sun for a few hours a day dries out; one in the shadow of a stone wall and a sycamore may not. Leaves, seeds and honeydew sit on it and break down into a green film, and the film is slippery long before it looks serious. A clean takes it off, and the choice of how to clean is covered in cleaning tarmac without damaging it.

Roots are the other thing to watch for. A tree that has stood beside a drive for decades will have roots under it, and where they lift the surface the fix is a repair, not a coating. If your property is listed or sits in a conservation area and you are thinking of changing the look or the layout of a frontage, check with the council before you commission anything. Restoring an existing tarmac drive keeps the same material in the same place.

Beyond the centre: the estates and the villages

Away from the old core, Carleton and Monkhill are largely twentieth-century housing, with semis and bungalows on drives that were laid when the estates went up. The colliery and its rows are part of the story of the town, and a lot of the housing around it was built for the people who worked there. Tarmac laid in one go along a street tends to age in one go as well, so neighbours often find that their drives have faded at roughly the same rate.

Out at Ackworth and Darrington the setting is more village than town, with longer drives, more garden and generally more exposure. A drive that crosses a field edge or runs alongside a hedge picks up different problems from a town frontage, mostly from vegetation and from water that has nowhere to go.

Working across Pontefract and the villages

We work throughout the WF7 and WF8 postcodes, including Carleton, Monkhill, Tanshelf, Ackworth and Darrington. The map on our contact page shows the area we serve, and if you are on the edge of it, ask. Pontefract sits close to Castleford to the north-west, and Wakefield, where we are based, lies to the west.