How much should homeowners expect to spend on a new garden? It is a question that often produces the familiar answer of “it depends”. Superior Garden Design St Albans has taken a more straightforward approach, publishing the typical costs customers can expect before they make an enquiry. A planting scheme working with an existing garden starts at around £4,000, while rebuilding the main section of a garden generally costs £25,000 to £40,000. A complete redesign and rebuild ranges from £40,000 to £65,000, with larger sloping gardens potentially costing more. The figures cover materials, plants, labour and VAT.

For a trade that tends to keep its numbers until someone has been round with a tape measure, that is an unusual thing to put in writing.

“Nobody publishes garden prices, so every first visit starts with the same slightly awkward dance,” says Marc, who runs the firm. “The homeowner doesn’t want to name a budget in case we spend all of it. We don’t want to name a figure in case it frightens them off. So everyone stands on the patio being polite for an hour. I’d much rather people looked at the numbers on the sofa on a Tuesday night and worked out whether we’re the right firm before we’ve even met.”

It is also, Marc admits, a filter, and a commercially sensible one. Surveying a garden, drawing it up and pricing it properly takes real time. Spending that time on a job whose budget was never going to meet the brief helps nobody.

“If someone has £10,000, I’ll tell them straight what that buys when it’s done well. Usually that’s new planting through the layout they’ve already got, or one small terrace relaid and framed with fresh borders. What I won’t do is quote them a cut-price version of a £50,000 garden and leave them wondering why it looks tired in two years.”

The garden nobody planned

A lot of the calls the firm takes come from people who have recently moved out of London. St Albans is about twenty minutes from St Pancras on Thameslink, and its interwar estates, places like Marshalswick and Chiswell Green, come with the kind of garden London terraces rarely offer: forty metres or so of lawn behind a wide 1930s semi.

“People will spend a year and a half on the kitchen and the loft, with drawings for every socket,” Marc says. “Then they look out of the back window at a garden the size of a tennis court and nobody has ever planned it. When they ring us, they nearly all describe it the same way. They say it has potential. What they usually mean is that it’s just a lawn with a shed at the end.”

The firm’s answer is to plan the whole garden before anyone digs, and then build it with its own team. Levels, drainage, the terrace, the paths and the planting are drawn up first, so the customer can move things around while that is still free. The same people who drew it then dig it out, lay it, build it and plant it.

“It is far cheaper to move a patio on paper than once it’s laid,” Marc says. “And because the plan is priced line by line, if the budget needs trimming the customer gets to choose what goes. Lose the pergola, fine. What I don’t want is somebody finding out three winters later that the saving came out of the base under everything.”

Where the money actually goes

The part of the pricing that surprises people most is not the total. It is the breakdown. On a typical whole-garden job, the firm reckons 20 to 30 per cent of the cost goes on digging out, drainage and sub-bases, all of which ends up buried. The paving everyone looks at is often a smaller share than the ground underneath it.

“When a quote comes in a third below everyone else’s, the missing third is nearly always underground,” Marc says. “You’ll never see it, which is exactly why it gets cut. You just find out in February when the lawn’s a pond and the patio has started to tip towards the back door.”

The firm photographs every drainage run, cable duct and sub-base before it gets covered over, so the customer has a record of what they paid for.

In St Albans the ground makes this more than a theoretical risk. Much of the city sits on heavy, flinty clay over chalk, with the chalk breaking through in the Ver valley. The clay holds winter rain and sends it towards the house. The chalk drains so fast that new planting can struggle to get going. The team digs test holes on every survey, because the answer can change from one street to the next.

“Clay-with-flints will grow you roses the size of cabbages and drown anything Mediterranean,” Marc says. “Half a mile away on the chalk it’s the other way round. If you plant for an average patch of soil, you’ve planted for nowhere.”

Some of the hardest jobs are the most ordinary-looking ones. The long, narrow gardens behind the Victorian terraces near the city centre often have no side access at all, so every slab, bag of sand and tonne of spoil goes through the house by hand. That gets planned in before the first delivery, down to which materials come in sizes two people can carry. In conservation areas such as Fishpool Street and St Michael’s, anyone planning work on a garden tree has to give the council six weeks’ notice first, which also needs to be in the schedule.

Why autumn is the time to start

For anyone hoping to use a new garden next summer, Marc’s advice is to get it planned now. A full redesign and rebuild typically takes three to five months from first phone call to finished planting, and the build itself is usually four to eight weeks on site.

“Get it planned in the autumn and we’re building over the winter and planting at the right time of year,” Marc says. “Ring in May and you’re lucky to be sitting out in it by September. The gardens that disappoint people are nearly always the ones that went straight from a quick quote to a digger on the lawn. Nobody planned them, and it shows.”

The first visit is free, and the prices are on the firm’s website for anyone who wants to check the numbers before picking up the phone.

The homes beneath Heathrow’s approach paths were not built with modern aviation in mind. Many predate the airport itself, and according to a Hounslow roofing business, that creates an unusual situation where an old roof, a passing aircraft and the question of responsibility can all become part of the same repair call.

There are few places where the age of a house and the movement of aircraft above it can intersect quite so literally. In parts of Cranford, a westbound wind brings a steady stream of aircraft overhead, sometimes roughly one a minute. They are approaching Heathrow only a couple of miles away, with the airport operating under a cap of 480,000 flights annually. Around seven days out of ten, aircraft arrivals pass over this part of west London.

Residents may barely notice them anymore. A roof with loose or missing tiles has a harder time ignoring them.

Older homes, older roofing systems

Hounslow’s housing stock expanded rapidly during the interwar period. The Great West Road opened in 1925, industry grew along the Golden Mile and residential streets followed. Many of the houses were completed before Heathrow began civilian operations in 1946.

Some of those original roofs remain in place today. Older tiles were commonly fixed to timber battens, often without a modern underlay. The construction was perfectly normal for its time, but those roofs have now spent decades exposed to wind, rain and general ageing.

For a roof approaching 90 years old, deterioration can be a much more straightforward explanation than anything happening in the sky.

“The planes get the attention, and fair enough, they’re the interesting bit,” says Charlie, from Watertight Roof Repairs Hounslow. “But most weeks what we’re actually looking at is a roof that’s older than the airport and has just had enough.”

The unusual role of wake vortices

Behind every aircraft are rotating areas of disturbed air known as wake vortices. They normally dissipate before reaching the ground, but aircraft close to runway level can occasionally leave a vortex with enough energy to affect a nearby roof.

When it happens, the damage can look surprisingly isolated. Tiles may be missing from one property while the neighbouring house has suffered nothing.

Individual incidents are uncommon, but the problem is established enough for Heathrow to have operated its Vortex Protection Scheme since 1993. Heathrow’s stated position is that airlines carry legal liability, while the airport funds verified repairs without charging homeowners. Properties in the areas closest to runway ends, where previous vortex incidents have been concentrated, can also receive blanket protection and preventative work.

The process depends on confirmation. Heathrow sends an assessor to establish whether the damage qualifies. Until that happens, the roofer may need to resist the instinct to simply replace everything that is broken.

“It’s about the only job I know where the best advice can be ‘don’t let us fix it yet’,” Charlie says. “If it’s a vortex strike, the airport pays. If somebody’s tidied it all away first, that money’s gone.”

One damaged roof, three possible explanations

A missing section of roof tiles does not automatically point to the same source of funding. A confirmed vortex strike falls under Heathrow’s arrangements. Storm damage may be covered by household insurance, depending on the policy and excess. A roof that has simply deteriorated through age is normally the homeowner’s responsibility.

The distinction matters. An insurance company can reject a claim where ordinary deterioration has been described as storm damage. At the same time, a homeowner who treats a vortex-related incident as routine maintenance could pay for something that would otherwise have been covered.

That makes the initial inspection particularly important.

“Sometimes the honest answer is that it’s the airport’s job, not ours, and we lose that work,” Charlie says. “But people round here talk over the fence. You tell next door the truth and it saves them a lot of money, and that tends to come back round.”

Why the first person at the door isn’t always the answer

Roof damage can create opportunities for another kind of trade too. Homeowners may encounter contractors who claim to have spotted a problem while passing by and offer to begin repairs immediately.

The long-standing advice from Trading Standards and Citizens Advice is to avoid making building decisions on the doorstep. Homeowners are encouraged to obtain several quotations and to be cautious about contractors who pressure them into agreeing to work immediately.

Watertight says it takes the opposite approach, offering free surveys, photographs of the roof, written quotations and a ten-year workmanship guarantee.

“None of that’s clever,” says Charlie. “It’s just what people ask for after they’ve had the other sort of visit.”

Expansion could change the roof-repair map

Heathrow’s proposed expansion remains part of the wider aviation debate. The government has backed expansion, while a draft Airports National Policy Statement has been before Parliament since June, with scrutiny continuing until 26 November. Heathrow has been working towards planning permission by 2029 and has indicated that a new runway would not be operating until approximately 2039.

For local roofing companies, the important detail is the potential change to aircraft routes.

A north-western runway could place additional neighbourhoods beneath lower approach paths, meaning some streets that currently experience aircraft at a distance could find themselves directly underneath them.

“If it goes ahead, there’ll be roads that go from never thinking about this to living with it,” says Charlie. “Fifteen years sounds a long way off. It isn’t, if you’re putting a roof on this year and expecting it to still be there.”

Current blanket protection zones are informed by historical vortex incidents. Newly affected streets would not necessarily have that same record, potentially leaving homeowners with roofs built before the new flight paths existed.

A local industry shaped by an airport

For much of Hounslow, Heathrow is simply part of the landscape. The airport provides jobs and supports businesses throughout the area, while aircraft noise has become familiar to generations of residents.

The housing beneath those aircraft is older than the aviation network overhead. Many of the roofs were designed for conventional weather conditions and have already survived several generations of use.

That means roofing work in this part of London occasionally involves a question that would be unusual elsewhere: is the roof simply old, has the weather damaged it, or has an aircraft played a part?

Most of the time, the answer is still straightforward. The roof has reached the end of its life. But when tiles land in a garden on a calm day and the house next door is untouched, the sensible first step may be a phone call to the airport rather than a ladder.