Sometimes a drain isn’t blocked, it’s broken. Clay pipes crack, joints get pushed apart by tree roots or traffic, and old mortar simply gives up after a century of service. The tell-tale signs: a drain that keeps re-blocking after every clear, a permanently damp patch of garden, an unexplained dip in the driveway, or new visitors of the whiskered variety.
The good news, and we mean properly good: most broken drains no longer need digging up. Relining inserts a resin-soaked liner into the existing pipe and cures it in place, leaving a smooth new structural pipe inside the old one. No trench through your garden, no jackhammer through the patio, done in a day for most domestic repairs. (We think watching a liner cure is fascinating. You don’t have to. That’s what we’re for.)
How we play it straight:
- Survey first, always. We never quote structural work from a hunch. The CCTV survey shows you the damage on screen, so you’re deciding from evidence, not from a salesman’s frown.
- Repair options in plain English. A localised patch repair (£300–£600) fixes a single cracked section. Full relining runs £400–£600 per metre. Excavation is the last resort, and if someone quotes you a dig without showing you camera footage, get a second opinion. Ideally ours.
- Insurance help. Accidental drain damage is covered by many buildings policies, and we provide the survey footage and written report your insurer needs. If the damage has caused a leak or water damage inside the house, that side is a plumber-and-insurance job, and our friends at Emergency Plumbers TW handle exactly that, 24/7.
A cracked drain left alone becomes a collapsed drain, and a collapsed drain becomes a hole in the ground with your name on the invoice. Catch it at the crack stage.
What to do right now in Ashford
- Signs of a broken drain: one patch of lawn that's always soggy, a new sinkhole or dip in the drive, rats appearing, or a drain that re-blocks within weeks of being cleared.
- Don't panic about the word 'collapsed'. Most damage is a crack or a displaced joint, and most of it can be fixed without excavation.
- If a blocked or broken drain has already flooded part of your home, photograph everything before cleaning up. Your insurer will want the evidence.
Drain Repair & Relining help, local to Ashford
1930s semis on clay subsoil: seasonal ground movement works pipe joints loose.
Ashford is thirties semi country, street after street of them off Church Road and Clockhouse Lane, and those houses sit on the heavy clay subsoil this corner of Surrey is famous for. Clay swells in wet winters and shrinks in dry summers, and the ground quietly flexes the drains with it. Year after year that movement works the joints of the original clay pipes loose, which is why Ashford gives us more displaced joints and slow-building blockages than almost anywhere on our patch.
The other local signature is the garden. Ashford’s plots are generous by London standards, and seventy years of hedges, fruit trees and leylandii have had exactly the same idea as every root system before them: there’s water in that pipe. Root ingress into back-garden drain runs, often unnoticed until the gully overflows, is a weekly Ashford job for us.
The happy news is that both problems are very fixable, usually without turning your lawn into a trench. A camera survey finds the exact joint, jetting clears the roots, and a patch line seals the entry point. TW15 is covered 24/7, we know the roads (and the roots), and we answer when you call.
We cover all of Ashford (TW15) — from Ashford High Street, Clockhouse Lane, Fordbridge Park and across Staines, Sunbury, Feltham. Being genuinely local means we already know what Ashford's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Ashford →