Dropped kerbs
Dropped kerbs on the Wirral
A vehicle crossing is council permission plus a piece of highway work. It is separate from your driveway and it has to come first.
- Dig depth and sub base stated in writing
- Edge restraint haunched, not just laid
- Drainage designed, not left to the border
Dropped kerbs
The order, which is the whole point of this page
You cannot legally drive a vehicle across a footway to reach a driveway without an approved vehicle crossing, which almost everybody calls a dropped kerb. It is a change to the public highway, so it is the council's decision and the council's standards, and it is entirely separate from the drive you build on your own land.
So the order is: find out whether you can have one, then build the drive. Doing it the other way round is the most expensive mistake available in this trade, because the answer is sometimes no and there is no appeal against a lamp column. We will tell you to go and ask before we quote the surfacing, which occasionally loses us the job and is still the right advice.
The things that commonly stop a crossing are physical and not negotiable. Insufficient visibility where you would pull out. A street tree, a lamp column, a telegraph pole, a bus stop, a pillar box or a service cover in the way. Too narrow a frontage to get on and off safely. A road where the council does not permit crossings. Some of those can be resolved by paying to move the obstruction, which is expensive, and some cannot be resolved at all. Often asked about alongside driveway drainage, groundworks and preparation and driveway prices.
Talk about the crossingApproval before anybody builds anything. The answer is sometimes no and there is no appeal against a lamp column.
Sightlines, street furniture, services, frontage width, or a road where crossings are not permitted.
Built to the council's specification, which is not the same as the specification for your drive.
Done across Birkenhead, Irby, and everywhere else on the peninsula. Cleaning, sealing and re-sanding an existing drive is a different trade: that goes to Wirral Exterior Cleaning.
Dropped kerbs on the Wirral
What this job looks like
These are placeholders, not photographs of our work. There are no job photographs on this site yet and nothing here is borrowed from anybody else's. Real ones go in as jobs are finished and customers are happy for us to use them.
Why people use us
What we do and what we do not
We build the drive and we can carry out the crossing where the council permits us to. The permission is yours to obtain.
- Plain advice on whether your frontage is likely to work
- The crossing built to the council's specification
- The crossing tied properly into the drive behind it
- We will tell you to apply before we quote the surfacing
Frequently asked questions
Dropped kerbs: the questions people ask
The ones that come up most. If yours is not here, ring and ask.
Do I really need a dropped kerb?
If a vehicle is going to cross the footway, yes. Driving over an unaltered kerb and footway is not permitted and it damages the footway, which the council can require you to put right.
Who applies, me or you?
The application is from you as the property owner. We will tell you plainly whether your frontage looks workable before you spend anything, and we can carry out the work once it is approved.
How long does it take?
That is the council's process and their timescale rather than ours, and it is weeks rather than days. Start it well before you want the drive built, because the drive is useless without it.
What if the council says no?
Then there is no legal way to drive onto the frontage, and building a drive would be money spent on a garden feature. That is exactly why we ask you to find out first rather than quoting you for surfacing.
Done across Birkenhead, Irby, and everywhere else on the peninsula. Cleaning, sealing and re-sanding an existing drive is a different trade: that goes to Wirral Exterior Cleaning.
Send a photo of your frontage from the road
One picture from across the street showing the kerb, the footway and anything standing on it tells us a great deal.
About Wirral Driveways
How the work is actually organised
Wirral Driveways takes the job as main contractor and puts the labour and the plant on it. One person quotes it, one person is answerable for it, and you are not chasing a groundworker and a paviour separately to find out who is coming.
What you get is a written scope with the build up stated, a date, and somebody whose problem it is if the date moves.
We install. We do not clean
This matters enough to say on its own page. Cleaning, sealing and re-sanding an existing driveway is a genuine trade and it is not this one. It needs different equipment, different materials and a different way of pricing.
So we do not offer it, we do not quote for it, and when you ask we will point you at wirralexteriorcleaning.com, which does it properly. Saying yes to work we are not set up for would be the easy answer and the wrong one.
What else we will tell you we are not
Structural retaining walls above a modest height, anything involving a highway other than a straightforward vehicle crossing, and tree surgery on a protected tree are all other people's work. All three come up on driveway jobs and all three are worth bringing the right person in for.
No photographs of our work, and why the site says so
There are no job photographs on this site. The slots are placeholders and they are labelled as placeholders. Nothing here is a stock picture presented as a job and nothing is borrowed from another company.
Real ones go in as jobs are finished and customers are happy for us to use them. The same goes for anything that looks like a customer quote: there is a section built and ready, switched off, until there are real ones with permission attached.
Get in touch
Tell us roughly how big the area is, what is on it now and which way it falls. A photograph from the pavement and one from the house answers most of it before anybody rings you back.
- Phone0151 453 8836
- Emailcontact@wirraldriveways.com
- WhatsAppSend us a photo of the job
- Based inWirral, Merseyside
- HoursMon to Fri 8 to 6, Sat 8 to 2, closed Sunday