Tarmac driveway
Selby
Tarmac driveways in Leeds and across Yorkshire
A plain, hard-wearing surface, laid hot and rolled smooth. Tarmac covers a long or wide drive without fuss, and a block edge in a second colour gives it a crisp finish and holds it in shape.
We promise to reply to every enquiry within the hour.
Who it suits
Tarmac suits a drive that needs to be hard-wearing and tidy rather than patterned: a long run up to a garage, a wide frontage that takes several cars, or a shared drive with plenty of coming and going. With no joints and no pattern, it’s one of the simplest surfaces to live with.
If your old tarmac has cracked, broken up at the edges or sunk where the cars stand, the base underneath has usually failed. A fresh layer on top hides it for a while, then the cracks come back through. So we dig the old drive out and build it again from the bottom up.
What’s included, from dig-out to finish
Our own employed team does every part of the job, start to finish. A tarmac drive from us includes:
- digging out the old surface and the ground beneath it to at least 200mm, and taking the waste away
- any drainage the drive needs, such as a channel drain where it falls towards the house or garage
- a new sub-base of MOT Type 1, laid and compacted in layers, or MOT Type 3 where the drive needs to drain down through
- a block edge to hold the tarmac in and give it a clean line, often in a second colour
- a base course of tarmac at least 60mm thick, then a surface course of at least 40mm on top, each laid hot and rolled while it’s still workable
- walking round the finished drive with you
Materials
Tarmac is the everyday name for asphalt: crushed stone bound together with bitumen, delivered hot and laid before it cools. We lay it in two layers: a coarser base course for strength, then a finer surface course that gives the smooth, closed finish.
Black is the standard colour. The edge is where you can add some character: a row of blocks in brindle, grey or buff frames the drive, like the York drive at the top of this page, and keeps the edges from breaking away.
Drainage and planning
Standard tarmac doesn’t let water through, so the drive needs a fall that carries the rain to a drain, a channel or a border. We set the levels during the groundwork, before any tarmac arrives.
For a front garden in England, surfacing more than five square metres with something water can’t drain through needs planning permission, unless the rain runs off onto a lawn or border. Porous tarmac, which lets water soak through, needs none. We lay it as the finished surface of a drive, as well as under our resin bound drives. The Planning Portal’s guide has the detail.
If the drive needs a new or wider dropped kerb, we make the application to the council for you. We then build the crossing ourselves, unless the council has its own approved contractor, and our town pages explain the local rules.
Time on site
Most drives take us 3 to 5 days, and most of that is the groundwork. The tarmac itself goes down quickly once the base is ready, but it can’t be laid in the rain or on a frozen base, so the forecast can move the day. Your written quote gives the start date we’ve agreed with you.
The guarantee
15 year structural guarantee on driveways.
Recent tarmac jobs
All 36 driveway projects
Tarmac driveway
York
Tarmac driveway
Harrogate
Tarmac driveway
Goole
Tarmac driveway
Harrogate
Tarmac questions
How soon can we drive on new tarmac?
You can drive on it after 48 hours. For the first few weeks, try not to turn the steering wheel while the car is standing still, and keep anything with a narrow foot, such as a motorbike stand or a caravan jack, off the surface. New tarmac stays slightly soft until it has fully hardened, especially in warm weather.
Does tarmac go soft in hot weather?
A little. Tarmac is held together by bitumen, which softens as it warms up, so on the hottest days a new drive can take marks from tyres turning on the spot. It hardens over the first few months and gets much less prone to it.
Can you lay new tarmac over my old drive?
Only if the old surface is sound, level and well supported. Cracks and dips in an old drive tend to come back through a new layer. We look at it at the site visit and tell you straight whether an overlay will last or the old drive has to come out.
Do I need planning permission for a tarmac drive?
For a front garden in England, yes if it's over five square metres of standard tarmac and the rain can't run off onto a lawn or border. Porous asphalt lets water through, so it needs no permission. The Planning Portal explains the rule.
How do we look after it?
Sweep it now and then and pull out any weeds along the edges before they take hold. Clean up petrol, diesel and oil spills quickly, because they dissolve the bitumen that holds the surface together.
Tarmac or block paving?
Tarmac is plainer, with no joints to keep topped up, and it's quick to lay over a large area. Block paving gives you patterns and borders, and it can be lifted and relaid in patches. The driveways comparison puts all four surfaces side by side.