You would think that making a flat surface to park a car on is relatively easy – and that there wouldn’t be a huge amount of difficulty in deciding exactly what to make it from. After all, as long as you can put your car on it, it doesn’t matter, does it?

But there is a huge variety of styles and materials available for your driveway surfacing, and it’s surprisingly easy to become bewildered by the variety of seemingly similar options available. Not all driveways are created equal, either, so it pays to make sure you’re up to speed on the options available, and the pros and cons of each. You don’t want to have your new driveway fitted and laid, after all, only to discover the hard way a few years down the line that you made the wrong choice!

So, we’ve put together this simple guide to paving and the options available.

Drainage and the Environment First things first: the issue of drainage is becoming ever more important in paving. Inadequate drainage can lead to increased risks of flooding, and can cause environmental damage when surface water which cannot run off interferes with natural water sources for animals.

Because if this, government legislation has come into force requiring planning permission for new paving work to be completed using porous materials. Thankfully, most materials, including block paving and impressed concrete, can be made porous.

If you already have a non-porous driveway, this won’t affect you (it’s only effective for newly paved surfaces), but if this is a new driveway or patio, or you already have a porously paved surface, you’ll need to make sure your the surface your contractor is installing is compliant with Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) regulations.

Block Paving
Block Paving is probably the most common driveway surfacing material in the UK, and involves flagstones of stone or brick laid across the driveway. The blocks are laid on compacted sand above a stone and hardcore base and held together by packing sand very tightly between them.

The blocks are available in a variety of sizes, from the size of regular building bricks, all the way up to large flagstones. Block paving tends to look very ordered and neat, although because there are gaps between the flags, an unmaintained block paved driveway can end up having plants and weeds growing between the blocks after a few years.

Impressed Concrete
Impressed concrete is another very popular material for driveways and paving, and can look extremely stylish when done well. To install impressed concrete paving, concrete is poured into the driveway area, allowed mostly to set, and then a patterned sheet of rubber is used to impress a design into the surface.

Colouring can also be added to the concrete before it has fully settled, so your driveway can come in a number of colours to suit the style of your surrounds. All in all, impressed concrete can make a driveway look stylish and very, erm, impressive, and also have the advantage of usually being a little cheaper than block paving to install.

Crazy Paving
Crazy paving is similar block paving, but rather than neat rows and regular patterns of rectangular blocks, the flagstones are irregular shapes and sizes, scattered in a chaotic yet aesthetically satisfying manner.

Because there can be greater distances between crazy paved blocks, they’re held in place with cement rather than being packed with sand – but because the mortar is weaker and more prone to erosion than the stones, well-laid paving should always be keeping mortar to a minimum.

Typically, the crazy paving flagstones will be bought from manufacturers as cracked and broken rejected flags, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that crazy paving is cheaper to lay than standard block paving. Apart from the increased cost of mortar, it takes some skill to arrange the blocks in a way which fills the available space while using as little mortar as possible – rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on it to guide you.

Gravel
The greatest thing about a gravel driveway is the sound. There’s very little which compares to the sound of driving onto a gravel surface in a car with a quiet engine, and the look of gravel, if well maintained, can be absolutely stunning. That said, gravel does have drawbacks, and chief among them is maintenance – owning a gravel driveway means dealing with pieces of gravel which can come lose and spread around the place, and indeed it means raking and smoothing down the surface periodically.

Resin Bonded
Resin Bonded surfaces are made up of aggregate – a mix of sand, gravel, stone and other natural materials, laid down and coated with a resin which binds them into a single strong layer. The aggregate will normally sit above a layer of asphalt and a layer of hardcore.

Resin bonded surfaces are often used to provide grip on public footpaths and footbridges, and can work well as cheap driveway materials – but they bring their own problems, and require some maintenance and upkeep. In general we’d recommend the stronger block paved or concrete driveways for keeping cars on.