On the Alton Estate a blocked drain is rarely one home's problem. Maisonettes and blocks share stacks and underground runs, so the ground-floor flat floods for something flushed three floors up. We find the shared run, clear it from the right chamber and tell the managing agent exactly what was in it.
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 Roehampton
- 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 Roehampton
Post-war estate drainage on one side of Roehampton Lane, interwar villas and university grounds on the other, and both kinds block in their own way.
Roehampton is the western end of SW15, where Putney Heath meets Richmond Park, and it is really two drainage systems. On one side of Roehampton Lane is the Alton Estate, one of the largest post-war estates in London, where blocks and maisonettes share stacks and underground runs and a blockage is a communal event. On the other are interwar villas, the university’s grounds and newer flats, draining through older clay under big gardens with the park’s trees alongside.
Estate calls are about finding the right pipe. A ground-floor flat backing up is usually a shared run or a stack serving several homes, and the fix is to clear it from the correct chamber and give the managing agent a straight account of what was in it, so the next flush is somebody else’s lesson. We do not plunge shared stacks. It sends the problem upstairs.
Villa calls are about roots and old joints. Richmond Park’s oaks and the mature gardens along the lane have been exploring the clay for a century, and the camera settles whether a repeat blockage is roots, a dropped joint or a collapse. We cover all of Roehampton from the Putney and Barnes side, around the clock.
We cover all of Roehampton (SW15) — from Roehampton University, the Alton Estate, Richmond Park (Roehampton Gate) and across Putney, Barnes, Richmond Park. Being genuinely local means we already know what Roehampton's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Roehampton →