Doncaster & South Yorkshire
Walling · Doncaster & South Yorkshire
Boundary, garden and retaining walls built on proper footings with the right mortar and drainage, so the wall you pay for once stays plumb, dry and crack-free instead of leaning within a few winters.
20 years' experience · fully insured · every project backed by a 2-year workmanship guarantee
20 years
Trading experience
Team of 11
Directly employed
£2m / £10m
Public & employers' liability
2-year guarantee
10-year warranty on request
CSCS · NVQ 6
SSSTS & NHBC Masterclass
Overview
A garden wall looks like the simplest brickwork there is, which is exactly why so many of them fail. A wall is a free-standing structure exposed to weather on both faces, and in the case of a retaining wall it is holding back tonnes of saturated soil. Surefoot builds walls across Doncaster and South Yorkshire on foundations sized for the job, with copings, movement provision and drainage designed in from the start.
Boundary and party walls, decorative garden walls, low retaining walls to create level terraces, planter and raised bed walls, pier and panel walls, walls with gate openings and railings, brick-on-edge and stone copings, and rebuilding walls that have moved, cracked or partially collapsed.
Homeowners defining a boundary, replacing a failed fence line with something permanent, terracing a sloping garden, or rebuilding a wall that has started to lean, plus landscapers and builders who need walling built to a standard that will not come back on them.
When a fence has failed for the third time, when a slope needs terracing to make the garden usable, when a boundary needs defining permanently, and when an existing wall shows leaning, bulging, stepped cracking or eroded mortar joints.
Free-standing and retaining walls have engineering requirements that decorative brickwork does not: footing depth and width, wall thickness and pier spacing for height, movement joints on long runs, and, for retaining walls, drainage behind the wall and a way for water to escape. Get any of those wrong and the wall does not last.
What it costs to get wrong
A leaning garden wall is not a cosmetic problem. It is a structure with a load on it, next to a path, a car or a neighbour's property.
Soil behind a wall holds water. Without a drainage layer and outlets, saturated ground exerts hydrostatic pressure the wall was never designed for. The wall bows, then it goes, usually after a wet spell, and usually onto whatever is on the other side.
Walls built off a shallow strip of concrete, or straight onto ground, move with frost and seasonal shrinkage in clay. The result is stepped cracking, a wall out of plumb, and a rebuild rather than a repair.
Mortar stronger than the brick pushes frost damage into the brick face. No coping, or a coping without a drip, lets water enter the top of the wall and freeze inside it. Both produce spalled, crumbling brickwork within a handful of winters.
Building a retaining wall a single skin thick, omitting piers on long runs, no movement joints, and using facing bricks below ground where engineering bricks are required.
Our process
Tell us the length, the height you want and what the wall is doing: dividing, retaining or decorating. Photographs of the line and the levels help enormously.
We check ground conditions, levels either side, drainage, boundary position and access, and confirm the wall type, thickness and pier requirement for the height you want.
Priced on the real excavation, the real brick and the real height, with the specification written down: footing size, wall thickness, coping and drainage included.
Footings excavated and poured to depth, engineering brick below DPC, wall built to gauge with piers, ties and movement provision, drainage installed behind retaining walls, then coped.
We walk the wall with you, check line, level and pointing together, and back it with a 2-year workmanship guarantee, with a 10-year warranty available on request.
What you get
Footings sized to the wall, piers where the height demands them, and movement provision on long runs.
Drainage behind retaining walls, weep provision and correctly detailed copings, so water leaves the structure instead of freezing inside it.
Unlike fencing, correctly built walling is not a recurring purchase every few years.
Brick, bond, joint profile and coping chosen to sit with your property rather than against it.
£2,000,000 public liability and £10,000,000 employers' liability, relevant when a wall sits on a shared boundary.
A 2-year workmanship guarantee on every wall we build, with a 10-year warranty available on request.
In detail
Walling covers a wide range of structures. The right specification depends on height, what the wall retains, and how exposed it is.
Half-brick and one-brick free-standing walls, pier and panel construction, retaining walls in brick or block with a faced finish, planter and raised bed walls, and screen walling with decorative bonds or pierced panels.
Facing bricks matched to the property, engineering bricks below DPC and in exposed positions, dense concrete blocks as a structural core, natural stone and reconstituted stone facings, and copings in brick-on-edge, stone, concrete or clay.
Concrete strip footings sized to wall height and ground conditions, engineering brick or dense block below ground, DPC where required, and for retaining walls a free-draining backfill zone, drainage pipe and outlets so water is not held behind the structure.
Stretcher, Flemish, English and English garden wall bonds, soldier and dentil courses, corbelled detailing, formed piers with capping, and gate and railing pockets set out to the ironwork rather than approximated.
Taking down and rebuilding leaning or bulging sections, repointing eroded joints with an appropriate mix, replacing spalled bricks, and adding piers or a new coping where the original wall lacked them.
Walls on or near a shared boundary need the line agreeing before work starts, and in some cases the Party Wall etc. Act applies. We flag it at the site visit rather than after the footings are in, and our £2m public liability cover applies throughout.
£2,000,000 public liability and £10,000,000 employers' liability cover, with a 2-year workmanship guarantee on every project and a 10-year warranty available on request.
Questions
Anything not covered here, call Michael on +44 7856 247499 and ask.
Related work
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Send photographs of the line and the levels, or call and describe it. We will visit, specify the footings and drainage properly, and price it in writing.
Fully insured · CSCS, SSSTS, NVQ Level 6 & NHBC Masterclass · 2-year workmanship guarantee
