Background
Hanley Park is one of the UK’s largest Victorian public parks and in 2015 secured £4.5 million of National Lottery funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and The National Lottery Community Fund. This money was used to restore the 123-year-old 60-acre site.
The footpaths around the park required resurfacing to allow visitors to safely walk around the 60 acres and and visit the popular attractions which include a new pavilion with café, three children’s play areas, fishing, bowling and a multisports pitch.
Henry Williams & Son are National Highways sector scheme 13 accredited for surface treatments including surface dressing and worked with multiple other contractors including Horticon and the Casey group on all phases of the works at Hanley Park.

Solution
Working alongside the principal contractor and many other contractors doing the wider park improvements HW&S carried out the footpath and carriageway surface dressing. The specification for the surface dressing was designed by our in houseHNss13 trained contract manager in accordance with the road note 39 guidelines. Our specialist plant
for footway surface dressing operations is designed and constructed in house based on our vast knowledge and experience in this area so it is bespoke to HW&S. It produces a calibrated and accurate application of the bitumen emulsion binder and the chippings to provide a quality assured product.
Accurate calibration and testing of the plant and its rates of spread (ROS) are critical to ensuring quality compliance and the successful delivery of a quality product. Too much application will result in bitumen ‘bleed’ through the surface and too little binder will release the chippings and create ‘bald’ areas and a similarly poor finish.
All our design work is checked against road note 39. As we work, we check our rates of spread are correct by carrying out carpet tile testing on the binder and tray testing on the chippings.
The carriageway surface dressing works at Hanley Park were laid through a combination sprayer/chipper (Chip Sealer). The Chip Sealer applies both the bitumen and chippings within the same operation and provides us with a computer-controlled calibration of both materials. This reduces the amount of plant and labour on site providing a fast safe and low impact operation.
The works were also carefully phased to ensure members of the public retained safe access around as much of the park as possible at any one time. To achieve this, there were clearly signed diversion routes whilst we resurfaced all the footpaths.
Outcome
The footpaths were all upgraded swiftly and safely with HW&S working collaboratively with the principal contractors and other sub-contractors.
The ‘new’ pathways now enable people to move around the park comfortably. This, along with the wider improvements, have encouraged more visitors.
Working on footways is a key part of our service offering, as such we continue to look at how we can innovate in this area. The current footway options are overlay or slurry seal whereas carriageway options include surface preservation treatments which protect and extend the life of the asphalt infrastructure. We have specialist equipment to work in all different types of footways and we continue to innovate in this area including the use of asphalt preservation.

Contact us
For more information on the services we provide, please contact us today by emailing us below or calling 01978 822 482.