Drain trouble in Surbiton? We answer 24/7.

Surbiton is the Surrey bank’s Victorian suburb, KT5 and KT6, built around the railway and the river, with avenues of tall villas off Victoria Road and 1930s semis filling Berrylands and the edge of Tolworth. Most of the villas are flats now, and that conversion is the whole drainage story. One house, built for one family and one scullery sink, now has four kitchens, four bathrooms and the same single clay run to the sewer it had in 1890.

So Surbiton blocks from the top down and floods from the bottom up. Grease and wipes from the upper flats collect in the one shared run, and the ground-floor flat is the first to know. We clear from the external chamber, jet rather than rod because a hole through the grease lasts a month and a clean pipe lasts years, and we give the freeholder or managing agent a straight account of what came out, since the next conversation is about who pays.

The avenues’ plane trees take care of the rest, finding every joint that a century of ground movement has opened. We cover Surbiton, Berrylands and Long Ditton at any hour from the Kingston side of our patch.