Walling in Wakefield: garden walls and retaining walls

It starts below the ground

Every wall we build stands on a concrete footing dug down past the soft ground and past the reach of the frost, wider than the wall so the load spreads out. That sounds obvious and it is, but a wall that has cracked in a stepped line up through the joints, or leaned out over a few winters, has almost always been stood on a scrape and a bit of concrete. Below ground level the brickwork changes too, because ordinary facing brick is not made to sit in wet soil. Get those two things right and the rest of the wall is bricklaying.

Footings

Concrete, dug down past soft ground and frost, and wider than the wall

Below ground

Engineering brick or hard stone, so nothing frost damaged is left sat in wet soil

Retaining walls

Clean stone, a membrane and a route out for the water behind every one

Copings

Fitted to throw water clear of the face rather than let it run down the brickwork

Matching in

Brick, sand and joint profile chosen against the house rather than off a pallet

Cover

Full public liability insurance, and no deposit taken before we start

Retaining walls are a different animal

A garden wall only has to hold itself up. A retaining wall has a bank leaning on it, and the load goes up sharply once that bank is wet through, which around here it will be. So a retaining wall is built heavier, sometimes thicker or with piers built into it, and it gets a drainage layer behind the face: clean stone against the back of the wall, a membrane so the soil cannot silt it up, and weep holes or a land drain giving the water somewhere to go. Without that, water builds up behind the wall over a wet winter and pushes it out, which is why so many old ones lean.

On a sloping garden a retaining wall is usually the thing that makes everything else possible. Cut the slope into two usable levels, hold the change with a wall, and you get a flat patio at the top and a lawn below instead of a bank nobody uses. That is a lot of the work we do, and the wall, the steps between the levels and the patio want designing together rather than one at a time.

Matching the house

The wall that looks right is the one that looks like it has always been there. That is less about finding an identical brick than about the mortar and the joint. Sand from the wrong pit gives you a mortar that reads pink or grey against the existing pointing and the eye goes straight to it, and a bucket handle joint next to a weather struck one looks wrong even if the brick is perfect. We take a sample or a photograph to the merchant, mix to match rather than to habit, and strike the joint the way the house is struck. On older stone property we will talk to you about a lime mortar rather than a hard cement one, because a hard mix on soft stone does the stone no favours.

Stone walling

Coursed sandstone laid in even beds is what most people picture, and it suits Yorkshire houses because it is what half of them are built from. Random walling and rubble work read older and looser. Either way the rules are the same as brick: build off a footing, keep the joints broken so nothing runs straight up through the face, and finish the top properly, whether that is stone copings, a rounded coping or a flat course. A tidy top course is the difference between a stone wall that looks built and one that looks stacked.

The small walls that make a garden work

Not every job is a big structure. A lot of what we do is low: a raised bed round a patio so you are not planting at ankle height, a border wall down the side of a house, a wall round a bin store, a low front garden wall rebuilt after a car has caught the corner of it. Small walls are quick, they are the cheapest way to make an outside space feel finished, and they are worth building properly for exactly the same reasons as a big one.

Questions we get asked about this