Drain trouble in Barnes? We answer 24/7.

Barnes has the feel of a village and the drainage of one too. It sits on a low, flat bend of the Thames with the common on one side and the river on the other, and the water table here is never far below the lawn. The Georgian terraces around Barnes Pond and the Victorian streets off Church Road drain through clay pipework that has had two hundred years of riverside ground movement to settle into, and settle it has.

What we see most in SW13 is water that has nowhere to go. After a wet week the ground is saturated, the surface water system is working flat out and a private drain that was already half silted simply stops. Then the back gully lifts, the downstairs loo gurgles and somebody rings us at seven in the morning. Clearing it is the easy part. Finding the dropped joint or the root mat that let the silt build up is what stops next month’s call.

The other Barnes reality is shared runs under boundary walls. A lot of the older terraces drain through the neighbour’s garden before they reach the sewer under the street, and blockages here very often turn into a conversation about whose pipe it is. We know the lateral drain rules, we do the camera work that settles the question, and we are happy to explain it to both households. We cover Barnes, Castelnau and the common, day and night.