The Brew Cabin

Advice would be very welcome for this - I am speccing up some external works as part of a rehab conversion scheme. The yard serves two flats, a village shop, a craft shop and a cabinet maker, but only parking for 3 cars, so is not heavily used except that every day the proverbial white van turns up laden with stuff from the cash & carry for the vilage shop and about once a week a pick up comes to the cabinet maker etc. The area wil have a tarmac finsih, I don't want to overspec, but also not to put something down which won't last. So, would an ordinary drive spec be OK or should I push out the boat and go for an access road type spec? Also, a communal courtyard off will be paved in salvaged gritstone flags and I suspect the gate between it and the tarmac area will be left open and white van will reverse on to it. Will I need to do additional stabilisation to the falgs at the tarmac / flag junction?

I'm not sure if there is an official definition that declares when a driveway becomes an access road. If someone was to ask me, as you have done, I would say that two or three houses could have a shared drive, but 4 or more would be an access road, as would any pavement serving one or more commercial properties. So, I reckon this is an access road.

Putting aside the definition issue, I would still spec the bitmac work as access road, as there's a strong likelihood that there'll be more than two vehicle movements per day, and it's always better to be safe than sorry.

As for the flags, I would need to know more about the flags themselves. If they were the great, big, thick 100mm+ ball-breakers, then they would, in theory, be OK on a sand or sand/cement bed over a sub-base, but if they were the thinner types, I'd definitely opt for a 100mm ST1 concrete bed, at least at the threshold and for the first vehicle length (3m or so) into the parking area. In fact, it's probably easier to spec all the flags to be laid on a 100mm concrete bed.