Course of blocks that meet pavement are loose

[Tony McC]

A comment I must make for the nay slayers on flat top edgings, if they are not needed then why does every major house builder in the UK use them ?

...because the contract for public footpath construction on new housing sites requires them to be installed as a rear edge for the footpath, and NOT as a restraint for any driveway.

The local authority will nearly always specify their requirements for a footpath to be of adoptable standard, and this will usually require an edging kerb, normally concrete, but sometimes timber, with a given amount of check. So the civils contractor doing the roads'n'sewers on a housing estate puts in the required edging.

When the houses are built, the groundworker is usually responsible for doing the flags-around and the driveway, and is not going to remove an existing edging.

Similarly, if the homeowner at some later date wants a driveway extension or upgrade, why would a contractor remove those edging kerbs? They form part of the public footpath, and as I said previously, they are not the homeowner's property, so should remain.

However, they key point is that those edgings were NOT installed as a drive restraint, but as a marker for the back edge of publicly owned highway.

[seanandruby]

Had to do some f t concrete edging on a grass verge so that half the grass belonged to the council and half belongs to the industrial units. Always seemed petty to me but when you consider maintenance costs.....?