Driveway widening & extending

Widening looks like a small job and is usually a slightly awkward one, because the new work has to marry into something that was built years ago to an unknown specification. The join is where a widened drive fails: two different build-ups, settling at two different rates, with a straight line between them for water to get into. Done properly the new section is dug to its own full depth, the existing edge is cut back to something solid, and the surface is laid across the joint rather than butted up to it.

The first practical question is what you are widening into. A lawn or a border is straightforward. A raised bed or a bank means a retaining structure and possibly a change of levels. A boundary wall or a neighbour's garage within three metres of the dig brings the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 into it if the excavation goes below their foundations — which a full-depth driveway dig beside a shallow-founded garden wall genuinely can. That needs a month's written notice, served by you rather than by the contractor.

The second is planning, and widening is where people most often trip over the front garden rule without realising it. The five square metre threshold applies to the impermeable area you are creating, so extending an existing solid drive by more than five square metres puts you in the same position as laying a new one. Draining the new section to a permeable area, or building it permeable, keeps it inside permitted development.

Matching the surface is the part everybody asks about and the part with the least reassuring answer. New block paving next to fifteen-year-old block paving will not match, because the old blocks have weathered and the same product has usually changed. There are three honest ways round it: lift and shuffle some of the existing blocks into the new area so the difference is scattered rather than a hard line, deliberately use a contrasting border to make the change look designed, or clean and re-sand the whole drive afterwards so at least the dirt matches. Tarmac and resin blend rather better; imprinted concrete essentially cannot be matched at all.

Widening is also the moment to think about how the car actually moves. An extra metre of width is worth much more at the point where you swing in off the road than at the far end by the house, and a small radius at the entrance saves the edge course from being clipped every week. Where the widening reaches the highway, the crossover may need extending too, which is a separate consent from Cheshire East and runs on its own timetable.

One more thing worth checking before anything is ordered: a tree in the way. In a conservation area every tree has six weeks' statutory protection whether or not it has a Tree Preservation Order, and a protected tree cannot simply be removed to make room for a car. Root protection also means a full-depth dig close to a mature tree may not be permissible even where the tree itself is staying.