Three generations of the same trade

Where it started

The photographs on this page are the real thing. Robert Butcher and his son on a road roller, and a Bedford lorry lettered R. Butcher & Sons, Road Contractors, Tarmacadam. That is the family business three generations back, doing the same trade we do now with a good deal less machinery and a great deal more effort.

Hot tar and chip laid off the back of a lorry has become modern surfacing plant, and the sites have changed from village roads to farmyards, estate drives and commercial yards. The principle has not moved at all: get the ground right, get the water away, and lay something that will still be there in ten years.

Laymac today

Laymac Ltd is the current name for that family trade, run by the third generation of the family out of Horsham. We work across Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and Dorset, mostly on rural and commercial sites: farms, estates, equestrian yards, private roads, holiday and visitor sites, and the driveways in between.

There is a fourth generation coming, and he is a Robert Butcher too.

We are a small firm and that is deliberate. It means the person who quotes your job is the person who turns up to do it, and it means we would rather tell you a surface does not need replacing than sell you one that does not.

How we work

• We come and look before we price. Every time, on every job.
• The quote is written, fixed and sets out the construction, so you can compare it properly against anyone else.
• If dressing or patching will do, we say so rather than quoting a full rebuild.
• On a working site we phase the job so you keep trading, milking or moving stock.
• We clear up before we leave.

Tulleys Farm

Robert Butcher, who founded R. Butcher & Sons, carried out the surfacing and roadworks for the Beare family in the early years of Tulleys Farm, back when it was a working farm rather than the visitor attraction it is now. That relationship carried into the next generation, with his father doing further surfacing there as the place grew.

Both businesses are still going, and we are proud to have had a part in that one. It is the answer we give when somebody asks what sixty years in a trade is actually worth. Not a certificate. A customer who has watched the work last long enough to tell you whether it did.

Why so much of it is drainage

Nearly every failed surface we get called to is a water problem wearing a tarmac coat. Water sitting on or under a road takes it apart from beneath, and no depth of new material on top will hold if the drainage is wrong. Three generations of doing this in wet clay country is mostly three generations of learning that, which is why we look at where the water goes before we talk about what goes on top.