A three-storey residential block on Leek Road stopped dead for six weeks. The culprit? A pocket of soft made ground that the desk study missed. In Stoke-on-Trent you never excavate blind. The drift geology map shows Devensian till draped over Mercia Mudstone, but the reality on site is often a mosaic of marl, sand lenses and—critically—centuries of pottery waste backfill. We design shallow foundations that work with this patchy ground. A single borehole to 6 m logged by a geotechnical engineer tells us more than a dozen window samples logged from a pickup. Once we know what we are sitting on, we apply BS EN 1997-1 Design Approach 1 to size the footing so settlement stays within the 25 mm serviceability limit the local building control officer will ask for. For sites near the Trent floodplain, we often run a CPT test to get continuous tip resistance and friction ratio profiles through the alluvial clays before selecting the final bearing stratum.
In the Potteries, the biggest threat to a shallow foundation is not the natural ground—it is the 200-year archive of buried bottle ovens and brick rubble.
