Concrete Patios near you

Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 creates a drainage approval regime with a striking effect on hard landscaping. Its central requirement is that construction work which has drainage implications may not be commenced unless a drainage system for the work has been approved by the approving body, which in practice is the SuDS Approving Body within the local authority. Construction work is defined broadly, covering anything done by way of, in connection with or in preparation for the creation of a building or other structure, and work has drainage implications if it will affect the ability of land to absorb rainwater.

The schedule has been commenced in Wales and not in England. The commencement information on legislation.gov.uk records the Welsh commencement, with the regime fully applying from 7 January 2019, and shows no corresponding commencement for England. The Welsh threshold is set by article 6 of the Sustainable Drainage (Approval and Adoption) (Wales) Order 2018, which came into force on the same date: the requirement for approval does not apply where the area of land covered by the construction work is less than 100 square metres, whether the work is a single dwelling house or any other type of construction, and the article applies whether or not planning permission is required for the work.

For a homeowner in Wales that produces a usable rule of thumb. A new hard surface of 100 square metres or more is caught and needs approval from the SuDS Approving Body before work starts, and that is separate from any planning question. Below that area the statutory approval does not bite, though the drainage still has to work. In England, Scotland and Northern Ireland there is no equivalent domestic approval body for a patio, and the right questions are the local planning authority's requirements and where the water will actually go, which is a design matter rather than a consent one.

The preparation is conventional and the pour is not. The area is excavated to formation, soft ground is dug out and replaced, a sub base is laid and compacted in layers, and the levels are set so that the finished surface falls away from the house at a consistent gradient. Formwork is set to those levels, a membrane and any reinforcement are placed, and the drainage that the patio discharges to is installed before anything is poured, because retrofitting a channel into a finished slab means cutting it.

On the day, the concrete is placed, compacted and struck off to the formwork, then left until the bleed water has gone before being finished. Everything decorative happens inside that window: brushing, tamping, washing back to expose the aggregate, or applying release agent and stamping a pattern. There is no second attempt. A crew that has to work an area larger than it can finish before the concrete stiffens will produce a surface that changes texture across the patio, which is why the bay layout and the number of people on site are legitimate questions to ask beforehand.

After finishing come the two stages homeowners rarely hear about. Joints are cut or formed on a planned grid, with isolation joints where the slab meets the house, a manhole or a wall, so the slab cracks where it was told to. Then it is cured and protected, and kept off for the period the contractor specifies. Sealing, where the finish requires it, happens later, once the surface is dry and clean, and on an imprinted patio the sealer is a functional part of the finish rather than an optional extra.

A properly built concrete patio is one of the longest-lived garden surfaces available in Britain, because it has no joints to erode, no units to sink and nothing to be lifted by frost individually. Its life is governed by three things: the base beneath it, the mix and finish at the surface, and whether water is allowed to sit on it or run under it. Get those right and the slab is likely to outlast several sets of garden furniture; get any of them wrong and the failures start in the first few winters rather than the second decade.

The commonest life-shortener is water rather than wear. A slab that ponds holds water on the surface through freezing weather and deteriorates in that patch first; a slab whose base is being washed out by a leaking gully or a downpipe discharging at the surface loses its support and cracks; and a slab sitting against a wall without an isolation joint transmits every bit of movement into that wall. None of these has anything to do with how much you walk on the patio.

The decorative finishes have their own clock. An imprinted patio depends on its sealer, which is a consumable: it wears, it weathers and it has to be stripped back and reapplied at intervals the manufacturer states, and a patio whose sealer has been allowed to fail completely looks far worse than a plain brushed slab ever will. Ask at quotation stage what the maintenance cycle is, who does it and what it involves, because this is the point that decides whether a decorative patio still looks good in ten years.

Most of the money in a concrete patio is spent before the concrete arrives. The factors that change a quotation are how much excavation is needed and how the spoil gets out of a back garden, the depth of sub base the ground requires, whether reinforcement is specified, how the concrete reaches the site given that many back gardens cannot take a ready-mixed lorry and need a pump or barrow runs, the finish you have chosen and how labour-intensive it is to achieve, and the drainage the patio discharges into. Steps, edges, kerbs, a threshold detail at the back door and the number of separate bays all add work that has nothing to do with the square metres.

Use LokalMatch to put those quotations next to each other. You describe the patio once with your postcode, including its size, the access to the garden, the finish you want and where you think the water should go, and patio and groundwork contractors serving your area make contact. There is no charge to a homeowner for asking, because the trades pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch neither builds patios nor sets prices, and it does not vet, rank or recommend the contractors who reply, so checking the falls, the drainage, the joint layout and the maintenance commitment is yours to do.