Richmond blockages are rarely just debris. The clay pipework off Sheen Road and around Petersham mostly predates the First World War, and the mature planes and horse chestnuts have been working on its joints ever since. If yours has backed up more than once, the roots are already in.
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 Richmond
- 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 Richmond
High-value period property, mature street trees, and root ingress in century-old clay runs.
Richmond’s drains are as period as its houses. The Victorian terraces off Sheen Road, the grand villas on Richmond Hill and the cottages in Petersham mostly run on clay pipework that predates the First World War, and in conservation areas nobody has ever been keen to dig it up. That’s exactly where relining earns its keep: we fix the pipe from the inside and the listed garden wall never knows we were there.
The borough’s magnificent trees are, professionally speaking, our biggest local rival. The planes and horse chestnuts around Richmond Green and the park edges push fine roots into every available pipe joint looking for water, and a root-bound drain re-blocks on a schedule until the ingress point is found and fixed. A CCTV survey here is rarely boring. (For us. We accept this is a niche form of entertainment.)
There’s also a practical Richmond reality: with property values around Richmond Hill and Kew among the highest in the country, foul water backing up into a basement kitchen does eye-watering damage per hour. When something does go wrong, it’s worth it being fixed quickly and properly documented. We’re local, we answer 24/7, and we arrive genuinely pleased to see a difficult drain.
We cover all of Richmond (TW9, TW10) — from Richmond Park, Kew Gardens, Richmond Bridge and across Kew, Petersham, Ham. Being genuinely local means we already know what Richmond's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Richmond →