Landscaping in Lutterworth, priced in writing before anything starts.
Lutterworth gardens in the old part of town have a distinctive shape: narrow, and very long. That is the burgage plot layout still doing its work eight hundred years later. It is a genuinely good garden to design, because you can give it separate areas that do not all have to be looked at from the back door, but it is a hard one to build, because everything arrives through the house.
Levels are the second thing we look at. The south side of the town falls away towards the River Swift, and on those plots a patio that is laid dead level will sit wrong against the house and drain the wrong way. Falls need to be set deliberately, away from the building, and the surface water needs somewhere to go that is not the neighbour.
On front gardens there is a rule that catches people. Laying more than five square metres of hard surfacing to the front of a house needs either a permeable material or a way of draining the run off to a soft area within your own boundary. Do neither and it needs planning permission. It is not an obscure technicality, it is national and it is enforced, and it is easy to design around if it is known about at the start.
Retaining walls on a sloping plot are a structural item, not a decorative one. Anything holding back a serious change in level gets designed and drained, not stacked.
Our landscaping page shows the range of the work, from patios and paths through to full garden rebuilds.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the Harborough District Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
Process, specification and what moves the price are set out on our landscaping page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Lutterworth street to the next.
Landscaping moves more material than anything except groundworks, and on a burgage plot every tonne of it goes through the house or over the fence. Where there is rear access from an entry or a back lane we will use it. Where there is not, we protect a route through and we plan deliveries in quantities that can actually be carried. This is the trade where the difference between a plot with side access and a plot without it shows up most starkly in the price, and it is why we will not quote a Lutterworth garden from photographs.
Part of our wider building work in Lutterworth.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
