About
Thanet & Hedges is run by Richard Lim — the district-hub of a small Kent ring covering the whole Isle of Thanet, plus town-deep sibling sites for Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate. Honest, no upselling.
I cut hedges. I reduce overgrown ones. I remove the ones that have to go. And I plant new ones — with the right species for Thanet's chalk-and-salt geography, not whatever the nursery has in stock.
That's it. No tree surgery, no lawn care, no fencing, no garden-services bundle. Hedges are a craft worth being good at. I keep the focus narrow so I am.
Thanet is a peninsula with one district council, one waste stream, one set of CAs and one shared coastal weather system. Most contractors treat one town in isolation. What actually helps a landlord or agent with property in three Thanet towns is a single crew across every CT9-CT12 postcode, one quote across all addresses, and one point of contact when four buildings need doing before summer letting starts.
Around 6,000 Londoners relocated to Cliftonville and Margate Central between 2020 and 2023. Many of them hold across more than one Thanet address; some are absentee owners in London who need photo-updates and card payment, not cash-on-door. Others are landlords under Thanet's Article 4 HMO direction (district-wide) or Selective Licensing (Margate Central and Cliftonville West). District-hub scheduling makes their lives easier.
Most of central Thanet is inside a conservation area — Margate Old Town, eight in Cliftonville, Ramsgate town centre, Broadstairs Old Town, Westgate's three, Birchington Square, Minster historic core. The peninsula's geology is Margate Chalk with Thanet Sand overlying in patches (Pegwell Bay is the type section). Manston records the lowest rainfall in the district decile and the highest sunshine on the mainland. The coast belt runs salt-laden NE and SE wind at every plot within a kilometre of the sea.
That means species picks are non-negotiable. Beech, hornbeam, cherry laurel, blackthorn and yew all fail on the exposed coast — they scorch or bronze in salt wind and their root systems don't like the shallow chalk. Escallonia, griselinia, tamarix, holm oak and hardy euonymus want to live here. A contractor from outside Thanet won't know this without being told, and will plant beech in Cliftonville and Leylandii in Westgate and be back reducing it inside a decade.
Three things you can hold me to on every job:
Email hello@thanethedges.co.uk. Call or WhatsApp 07763 100 477. Based in Broadstairs CT10; covering all of CT8, CT9, CT10, CT11 and CT12.