Footings & Excavation in Bedworth, priced in writing before anything starts.
Groundworks matter more in Bedworth than in most of the towns we work in, because of what the ground has been used for.
The town sits on a worked coalfield. Twenty pits around here were producing 5.8 million tons a year at the 1939 peak, and the last of them in the Bedworth area, Newdigate, only closed in 1982. Before we design foundations we want a Coal Authority mining report for the address. It is inexpensive, it comes back quickly, and it tells you what is actually known about the ground under the plot. Getting it before a design is settled is straightforward. Getting it after a trench is open is a bad afternoon.
We are not going to tell you your plot is affected. Nobody can say that from the pavement, and any builder who does is guessing with your money. What we will say is that on this ground the check is cheap and skipping it is not a saving.
The ordinary considerations still apply on top. On shrinkable clay a foundation near a mature tree has to go deeper than standard, sometimes considerably. We dig to find bearing rather than to reach a figure on a drawing, and the inspector will want to see the same.
Everything is inspected before it is covered. Our footings and excavation page explains our approach.
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 Nuneaton & Bedworth Borough 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 footings & excavation page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Bedworth street to the next.
Getting a machine onto a colliery terrace plot with no side entry is sometimes not possible, and the job becomes a hand dig, which is several times the labour for the same hole. Muck away needs a grab lorry with somewhere legal to stand, and on Bedworth’s older streets that is a highway matter for Warwickshire County Council rather than something to sort out on the morning. All of it goes in the price at quotation stage.
Nothing is dug until we know what is already down there. On top of the mining question, gas, water, electricity and telecoms run through these gardens in positions that frequently bear no relation to the records, and on the colliery terraces the records are the oldest of the lot. We scan before breaking ground, which costs an hour and avoids the kind of afternoon that ends with a utility emergency crew and the street watching.
Part of our wider building work in Bedworth.
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.
