Landscaping in Bedworth, priced in writing before anything starts.
Gardens in Bedworth raise a question that gardens in most towns do not: is the ground you are building on going to stay where it is.
This was a coal town for centuries, and the surface has been worked, tipped on, levelled and re-levelled by people who were not thinking about anybody’s patio. A great many gardens here sit on ground that was made up rather than found, and made up ground behaves differently. It settles for years after it is placed, it settles unevenly, and it does not carry load the way undisturbed ground does.
The practical consequence is that the cheap version of a garden fails here more often than elsewhere. A paving slab laid on a thin bed over made ground will rock within two winters. A dwarf wall built off a shallow strip will crack at one end. Neither is a workmanship problem, it is a foundation problem, and the answer is to build off something that reaches proper bearing rather than to lay a heavier slab and hope.
So on Bedworth plots we dig before we design. A trial hole in the garden costs almost nothing and tells us whether we are laying onto sound ground or onto a metre of fill, and that single answer changes the specification for the whole job. Where the ground is good, and often it is, we say so and price accordingly rather than selling a foundation nobody needs.
Retaining structures deserve particular care for the same reason. Anything holding back a real change of level is a structural element, and on ground that is still moving it needs designing, founding and draining properly. A retaining wall that fails does not fail gently.
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 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 landscaping page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Bedworth street to the next.
In Bermuda, where an Article 4 direction applies and the village has barely changed since 1893, the front of the property is part of what is protected. Frontage treatments, walls and railings there are worth checking before they are altered rather than afterwards, and we check as a matter of course.
On the colliery terraces there is no side access, so material comes through the house. That is a real cost and we put it in the quotation rather than absorbing it and cutting corners elsewhere to compensate. We would rather give you an honest higher number than a cheap one that turns into a variation in week two.
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.
