Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Hailsham

Hailsham is an old market town wrapped in four decades of estate building, and almost all of my work here is on the estates rather than in the middle.

That makes it a fairly uniform job. Drives and patios laid between roughly 1980 and 2005, block paving and concrete slabs in the main, sensible sizes, straightforward access. What makes Hailsham different is not the paving. It is the ground under it.

A high water table

The town sits on low ground at the western edge of the Pevensey Levels, and the water table is close to the surface across a good part of it.

The consequence people notice is that things stay wet. A patio here does not just take moisture from rain falling on it; it takes moisture from below, wicking up through porous slabs and through the bedding. That is why a Hailsham patio can still be dark two days after the last shower when an equivalent patio at Heathfield is bone dry.

For me it means one practical thing above all others: drying time before re-sanding. Kiln-dried sand only works if it can run freely into the joint, and it will not run into a damp one. In summer that is a non-issue. Between November and March I plan on coming back the next dry day to sand, rather than brushing damp sand across a wet drive and leaving it bridged at the top with a hollow joint underneath. That return trip is priced in.

Standing water and falls

The single most common thing I am asked to fix in Hailsham is standing water, and it is usually not something I can fix.

A patio should be laid with a fall of around one in eighty, running away from the house. Plenty of the patios I see here have less than that, or have a fall that runs the wrong way, or have settled since they were laid so that the fall has been lost. Water then sits in a shallow pool for days.

Cleaning helps at the margin. Clearing silt out of joints and off the surface sometimes gets a slow-draining area moving again. But if your patio genuinely ponds after every shower, the fix is lifting and re-laying it to a proper fall, and that is not a job I do. I will tell you that plainly, because the alternative is you paying me to wash a puddle.

Black spot, and why it is worse here

Standing water and permanently damp stone are ideal conditions for black spot lichen, and Hailsham has more of it than anywhere else I work.

Those hard black discs are not dirt. Lichen is a symbiotic organism that roots into the top layer of porous stone, and it holds on inside the material rather than on the surface. Pressure that removes it also removes stone.

The honest method is a biocide, which kills it, followed by three to six months in which the dead lichen breaks down and weathers away. It is slow, it works, and it leaves your slabs intact. I would rather explain that than sell you a fast result that costs you the face of your paving.

What the estates actually need

Most Hailsham jobs are a block paved frontage between 25 and 40 square metres, plus a rear patio of 15 to 25 square metres. The drive needs cleaning and re-sanding. The patio needs cleaning and, given the ground conditions, genuinely benefits from the biocide treatment.

A typical pairing comes out somewhere between £280 and £380 for both, which is worth knowing before you ask.

What it costs

Block paving £5.50 a square metre including kiln-dried re-sanding. Slabs and concrete £4.50. Natural stone £5. Moss and algae treatment £1.50 a square metre, which I recommend here more often than I do inland.

Minimum job £150. Hailsham is 14 miles from Seaford, about 26 minutes on the A27 and A22, and there is no travel charge.

Getting here

14 road miles from Seaford, about 26 minutes via the A27 east then the A22. 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 Hailsham: Hellingly, Upper Dicker, Herstmonceux, Magham Down, Amberstone. If you are somewhere not on that list but nearby, ask anyway.