Petersham drains are old, shallow and close to the river, which means silt. The meadows flood by design, the water table follows, and a clay run with any dropped joint fills with fine sediment every winter. We clear it, then show you the joint, because the silt is the symptom.
A blocked drain never fixes itself. It builds. Grease, wipes, roots and forty years of “it’ll be fine” collect in the pipe until one morning the shower is ankle-deep and the kitchen smells like something died under the floor.
Here’s the part we should probably keep to ourselves: we find blockages genuinely interesting. Every blocked drain is a little mystery. Is it a fatberg? Tree roots that found a joint in a Victorian clay pipe? A toy dinosaur? (Real find. His name is Trevor now.) The point is, the job everyone else dreads is the one we turn up excited about, with the right kit to solve it first visit.
We clear the blockage at its source, not just poke it further down the pipe to become next month’s call-out. If more than one drain is backing up at once, that usually points to the main run between your house and the sewer, and we handle that too.
What it costs: most straightforward domestic blockages in the TW area run £90–£180, rising to £150–£250 for middle-of-the-night call-outs. You get a price on the phone or at the door before any work starts, and it doesn’t change when we’re covered in the evidence.
One honest note: standing water from a blocked drain is a health hazard, and foul water backing up indoors can damage floors and walls quickly. The sooner it’s cleared, the smaller the bill. Day or night, we answer.
What to do right now in Petersham
- Stop running water into the affected drain, sink or toilet. Every litre you add has nowhere to go.
- If an outside gully is overflowing, keep children and pets away from the standing water.
- Don't pour chemical unblocker into a fully blocked drain. It sits in the pipe, and whoever clears it (us, happily) gets a face full of it.
- Call us. We'll give you an honest ETA and talk you through anything urgent while we're on the way.
Blocked Drain help, local to Petersham
A Georgian village on the flood plain: conservation-area gardens, two centuries of pipework and a water table that sits just under the lawn.
Petersham is the village in TW10 between Richmond Hill and Ham, Georgian houses and Victorian cottages set beside the meadows that the Thames floods on purpose. It is one of the prettiest places we work and, from a drain’s point of view, one of the dampest. The water table here is never far below the grass, and it rises every winter into the backfill around pipes that were laid before anyone had heard of a camera.
The result is silt. A Petersham run with a dropped joint, and most have one by now, lets fine sediment in each wet season until the bore closes. Clearing it is straightforward. Stopping it means finding the joint, and on camera the entry point is usually obvious: a lip of clay with a little delta of silt behind it.
Everything we do here is done with the garden in mind. Surveys run through the existing chambers, repairs are relining rather than digging, and the footage is kept for the insurer, because period houses on a flood plain do end up claiming. We cover Petersham, Ham and the Richmond Hill slopes at any hour, and we promise not to put a van on the meadow.
We cover all of Petersham (TW10) — from Petersham Meadows, Richmond Park (Petersham Gate), River Lane and across Richmond, Ham, Richmond Hill. Being genuinely local means we already know what Petersham's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Petersham →