Drain trouble in Kew? We answer 24/7.

Kew is Richmond’s quieter neighbour and, under the pavement, its older sibling. The terraces between Kew Green, Sandycombe Road and North Sheen went up in the decades either side of 1900 on salt-glazed clay drains, and those drains still do the job, mostly. What has changed is the ground. The Thames sits at the end of almost every street here, and each winter the water table rises into the backfill around the pipes, lifting silt into any joint that has moved. That is why a Kew gully that behaves all summer backs up in the first wet week of November.

The trees do their part too. Kew’s plane trees and the mature gardens off Lichfield Road push roots towards the one warm, wet thing underground, and a hairline gap in a clay collar is all the invitation they need. We clear root blockages across TW9 every month, and the ones that stay cleared are the ones where the camera found the entry point and the pipe was lined.

There is a practical Kew point as well: a lot of the housing stock here is shared. Semi-detached pairs and terraces often drain into one run before it reaches the sewer, so a blockage in one garden floods the neighbour first. We are used to explaining who pays and why, and to doing the survey that proves it. We are local, we answer at any hour, and a Kew drain is one of our favourite problems.