Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Battle

Battle is 25 miles from Seaford, the furthest thing on my list and past the radius I normally quote. I take work there, grouped with the eastern jobs, and the reason it is worth a page of its own is the stone.

Ashdown Sand

The High Weald around Battle is built on the Ashdown Formation, and a lot of the older local building and paving material came out of the ground within a few miles of where it sits.

That stone is soft and it is porous. Considerably more porous than the imported Indian sandstone that makes up most modern patios, and vastly more so than concrete or porcelain.

Porosity changes the whole nature of the cleaning problem. On a dense surface, algae is a film on top and cleaning removes it. On Ashdown Sand, water carries spores into the pore structure in the top few millimetres, and the colony lives inside the stone. You can clean the surface perfectly and leave a healthy population underneath it, which then recolonises from within over the following months.

That is why customers here tell me their patio was green again by autumn when the same treatment on a Polegate block drive lasted two years. It is not the clean, it is the material.

Which is why I recommend sealing here

I spend most of my sealing page telling people they do not need it. Battle is the exception.

An impregnating sealer works by lining the pores of the stone so that water cannot get in. On dense paving that is a convenience: it keeps stains on the surface where you can wipe them off. On genuinely porous local sandstone it does something more fundamental, which is deny the algae the habitat it has been using.

Clean, allow two or three dry days, then seal, and you have changed the interval between cleans rather than simply resetting the clock. That is the strongest case for sealing anywhere on my patch.

Frost, and the flaking you may already have

Porous stone that holds water also holds ice. Water expands as it freezes and pushes thin flakes off the surface, which is called spalling, and on old Ashdown Sand paving it is common.

Thick moss makes it worse by keeping the stone saturated right through winter, so a mossy patio here is not only unsightly, it is actively shortening the life of the slabs.

Cleaning a spalling slab makes the damage more visible, because the growth was hiding it. I will point that out before I start rather than after. On a badly spalled patio my honest view is often that cleaning is the wrong spend and the slabs need replacing.

Woods and damp

Battle sits in wooded, damp country with a high proportion of tree cover and rainfall well above the coastal average. Everything I have said elsewhere about shade, leaf tannin and slow drying applies here at the stronger end of the range.

In practice that means winter jobs here are two-visit jobs, and it means the biocide treatment is worth taking on almost any surface.

Netherfield, Catsfield and the lanes

Netherfield, Catsfield, Whatlington and Sedlescombe are the same trip and the same rate. Properties out that way tend to be larger, older and more likely to involve local stone rather than imported paving, which brings all of the above into play.

Being straight about the distance

Battle is a 48 minute drive each way and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Your price does not include a travel charge and it does not need to, because I only take work out there when I can group it.

For a job of 30 square metres or more that is rarely an issue. For a small patio I may ask you to wait a fortnight until I have another booking in the same direction. That is the honest arrangement, and it is better than quoting you a Seaford lead time and then not turning up.

What it costs

Natural stone, which covers local sandstone, is £5 a square metre. An impregnating sealer is £5.50 a square metre on a separate dry visit, and here I mean it as a recommendation rather than an option. Slabs and concrete £4.50, block paving £5.50 with re-sanding. Minimum job £150.

Getting here

25 road miles from Seaford, about 48 minutes via the A27 then A271 and A2100. Battle is at the outer edge of what I cover, so I try to book it alongside another job in the same direction. It does not change your price, it just means I may offer you a particular week rather than any day you like.

Villages and areas I work in around Battle: Netherfield, Catsfield, Whatlington, Sedlescombe. If you are somewhere not on that list but nearby, ask anyway.