Welcome to Paving Decking Advice

A warm welcome to the Paving Decking Advice web-site.  On this site you'll find a wealth of useful information about paving and decking for the home.  But why would you want to have decking instead of the more traditional surfaces?

What is its appeal? Like its rival, the patio, decking offers us an "outdoor room": in other words, urbanisation via the back door. It is, its manufacturers assure us, the "new lawn" - and remember here that the lawnmower was invented by a Victorian textile designer. It is, above all, tidy. That, according to a survey by B&Q, is the second most important quality that people desire of their neighbours' gardens (the first is that they should be invisible).

All this suggests an anally retentive civilisation which cannot see nature other than in its own image and wishes to banish risk and uncertainty to the far horizons. (It then disappears on backpacking rainforest eco-trips and round-the-world yachting ego-trips in search of risk, but that's another story.)

It also suggests an ecologically illiterate culture which cannot see the damage its paving and decking are doing, not only to the microfauna that birds and animals depend on, but to the drainage systems of a globally warmed and therefore stormier world. By hard-surfacing our urban areas, for example, we create the ideal conditions for flash floods and sewage overflows.

Why do the deckers, pavers and garden designers not tell us these things? Let's turn the question on its head. How many TV programmes or magazine articles does it take to tell people to leave their gardens alone? Not many, is the answer - and so there wouldn't be much scope for ads, sponsorship deals or celebrity spin-offs either. And you probably wouldn't sell many nest boxes - we'd have the nooks and crannies for free. There may not be much money in nature by itself, but there are small fortunes to be made out of messing it up.