Tarmac & asphalt driveways in Macclesfield
Tarmac gets a mixed reputation in this country and almost all of it is earned by bad tarmac rather than by the material. Properly laid — machine-laid or hand-laid over a compacted crushed-stone base, in a binder course and a wearing course, rolled hot and finished against a solid edge — it is a genuinely good driveway surface: seamless, quiet, quick to lay and simple to repair.
Badly laid tarmac is the stuff everybody has seen. A single thin skin of material spread straight over the old drive or over bare soil, rolled with something too light to compact it, and finished with a feathered edge that has nothing holding it in. It looks convincing for a summer. Then the edges crumble, the surface ravels into loose chippings, and the first hard winter finds every weak spot.
Depth and edges are the two questions worth asking. A domestic drive normally wants a binder course and a wearing course over the base rather than one layer doing both jobs, and every free edge needs either a kerb, a block edging or a properly formed and supported haunch. A quote that gives you a price per square metre and no thicknesses is not telling you what you are buying.
Tarmac is also the surface the doorstep trade sells, so it carries a warning the others do not need. The pattern is always identical: an unbooked knock, a claim of material left over from a job nearby, a price that only stands today, and cash up front. Real tarmac is bought hot by the tonne against a booked job and cannot be stockpiled in the back of a tipper for a week. There is no such thing as leftover tarmac going spare in your street.
Tarmac & asphalt driveways — every job, in detail.
5 jobs in this category. Each has its own page explaining what's involved, what your contractor checks and — just as importantly — when a job can safely wait.
Tarmac driveway
A tarmac drive laid in proper layers over a compacted stone base — a binder course and a wearing course, rolled hot, finished against a restrained edge. The thicknesses go in the quote, because depth and edges are the only two things that decide whether a tarmac drive lasts fifteen years or two.
Read more →Tarmac repair
Cutting out failed tarmac back to sound material, dealing with whatever caused it underneath, and reinstating in proper compacted layers. Which faults are worth patching and which mean the drive has come to the end gets answered honestly before any work is priced.
Read more →Tarmac resurfacing & overlay
A new wearing course laid over a drive whose base is still sound — the most economical way to make a tired tarmac or concrete drive look and perform like a new one. Whether the existing base is genuinely up to it is established before anything is priced, because that is the whole decision.
Read more →Coloured & red tarmac
Tarmac in red, buff, green or grey rather than black — either as a pigmented asphalt laid through, or as a surface coating applied over black tarmac. The two are very different products with very different lifespans, and knowing which you are being quoted matters.
Read more →Asphalt driveways
Larger drives, shared accesses and long rural approaches surfaced in machine-laid asphalt — denser and more consistent than hand-laid work, and the right answer once an area gets big enough for a paver to be worth bringing in.
Read more →Not sure which one you need?
Describe it in your own words on the quote form. Your contractor will work out what the job actually is when they ring you back — usually the same day.
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Tell us what you need and it goes straight to our Macclesfield driveway contractor — one callback, usually the same day. The quote is free and there's no obligation.