Patios in Billingham
Patio work across Billingham's TS22 and TS23 postcodes: the town's postwar estate gardens with their long rear plots, the larger houses at Wolviston and Wynyard, and a steady flow of replacements for tired 1960s concrete terraces. Slabs from £50 per square metre, stone from £80.
A town built to a plan, gardens included
Billingham's postwar expansion left it with something unusual on Teesside: consistency. Whole streets across Low Grange, Billingham Beck, Cowpen and Neasham share the same house type and the same generous rear garden, typically long, level and laid to lawn with a small concrete terrace by the back door. Sixty years on, that terrace has usually cracked, sunk at one corner or simply become too small for how the garden is used. The standard job here is replacing it with something two or three times the size, which lands most quotes in the 25 to 40 square metre bracket.
Value across a big area
Where the area is large and the budget is finite, concrete slabs at £50 to £80 per square metre remain the sensible answer, and modern riven pressed slabs bear no resemblance to the grey flags they replace. A useful local trick is to spend the saving on detail rather than surface: a brick edging course matched to the house, a stone band at the back door, or a low wall with built-in seating. That approach costs a few hundred pounds and changes how a big plain terrace reads. The cost guide works through the arithmetic.
Wolviston, Wynyard and the bigger plots
North and west of the town the picture changes. Wolviston village and the Wynyard estate have larger gardens, wider budgets and a preference for a finished scheme rather than a slab square: porcelain terraces, matching steps down to lawn level, and retaining walls where the plot slopes. Those jobs regularly combine porcelain, paths and steps and walling into one project, which is both cheaper and tidier than commissioning them separately.