Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Alfriston

Alfriston is six miles from Seaford up the Cuckmere valley, and it is the closest thing on my list to a job where the correct answer is often to use less machine, not more.

The village is largely flint and brick, a good deal of it listed, and the hard surfaces match. Brick paths laid in herringbone or basketweave a century ago. Stone flags at thresholds and around doorways, worn into dips where people have walked. Flint walling everywhere, held together with lime mortar. Newer properties on the edges of the village have modern paving and behave normally, but the village centre does not.

Fire skin, and why old brick is fragile

Handmade brick fired in a traditional kiln develops a harder, denser outer surface, sometimes called the fire skin. It is what makes an old brick weather well for two hundred years.

Once that skin is broken, and frost, salt or a previous over-enthusiastic cleaning will break it, the material underneath is comparatively soft and porous. Every subsequent pass with a pressure washer removes some of it. You can watch the mortar joints stand slightly proud as the brick around them erodes, which is the clearest visual sign that a path has been cleaned too hard in the past.

There is no repairing that. So on old brick I use a biocide, a stiff brush and a low pressure rinse, and I accept a slower and slightly less dramatic result in exchange for not eating the path.

Lime mortar

Nearly every wall and a lot of the paving in the village core is bedded or pointed in lime. Lime is deliberately weaker than the masonry, so that any movement cracks the mortar and not the stone, and it is meant to be sacrificial and repointed periodically.

That softness means water at pressure removes it easily. On a wall, the consequence is water getting into the core. On paving, an open joint lets water under the slabs and starts a settlement problem. I keep the lance away from lime pointing entirely.

The valley, and why things stay damp

Alfriston sits on the valley floor with the downs rising on both sides. In practice that means direct sun arrives late and leaves early, and it means cold damp air pools here overnight in a way it does not on higher ground a mile away.

The effect on paving is straightforward. Surfaces stay wet for longer, algae has more hours in which to grow, and regrowth after a clean is faster than the general guidance suggests. Customers here often assume the clean was not done properly. It was; the site is just working against it.

That is the strongest argument for the biocide treatment anywhere on my patch. On a shaded Alfriston terrace it can be the difference between annual cleaning and cleaning every second or third year.

Chalk and the Cuckmere

The ground here is chalk with river alluvium along the valley bottom. Where paving has been laid on the alluvial ground near the river it can move seasonally as the ground wets and dries, and that shows as slabs that rock in winter and sit flat in August. Cleaning does not affect it either way, but it is worth knowing that the movement is the ground rather than the paving failing.

The villages around

Litlington, Berwick, Wilmington, Milton Street and Lullington are all part of the same trip and the same rate. They share the valley conditions and a lot of the same building materials.

What it costs

Natural stone is £5 a square metre. Standard slabs, concrete and modern paving are £4.50. Where the right approach is a soft wash and a brush rather than a machine, I charge the same rate and take longer.

Minimum job £150. Alfriston is fifteen minutes from Seaford, so a small job here is easy for me to fit in.

Getting here

6 road miles from Seaford, about 15 minutes via the A259 then the Litlington road up the Cuckmere. Travel is my cost to carry, so the square metre rate and the minimum charge are the same here as they are on my own street.

Villages and areas I work in around Alfriston: Litlington, Berwick, Wilmington, Milton Street, Lullington. If you are somewhere not on that list but nearby, ask anyway.