Commercial groundworks and drainage.

What's included.

Site clearance, excavations, foundations, slab installations, drainage, and attenuation upgrades.

• Site clearance and excavation
• Trial holes and investigation digs
• Foundations and concrete pads
• Reinforced concrete slabs
• Retaining walls
• Voids made safe and infilled
• ACO and channel drainage
• Surface water and pooling problems
• Manholes, gullies and chambers
• Attenuation upgrades
• Cut and fill, grading and earthmoving
• Working to your structural engineer

Groundworks rarely start from a clean sheet. More often there is a problem to solve: a slab that has cracked, water pooling where it ought to drain away, or a void nobody knew was there. In Headingley, a concrete slab over an old coal store beneath the footpath was at risk of collapse and letting surface water into the basement below a shop, damaging the tenant's stock. We worked it through with the managing agent and a structural engineer, agreed the right fix between us, and made it safe.

When a job needs a new base, we build it from the ground up. In a Leeds city-centre car park we turned an old planter into an outdoor seating area. A trial dig came first, to understand the existing slab. Then we excavated, reduced the levels by a metre, and cast a 150mm reinforced concrete slab with ACO drainage built in, so the new space drains the way it should.

Larger sites often start with cut and fill: grading the land to the levels a build or a surface needs, moving earth from where there is too much to where there is too little, and laying the aggregate sub-base and drainage layers that everything above depends on.

Because we also do surfacing, fencing and line marking, the groundworks are not a separate contract that stops at the concrete. The same team takes it through to the finished surface.