Ealing gardens, conservation-area frontages and tiled Victorian paths are not for digging up. Relining repairs a cracked or root-damaged run from inside the existing chambers, and on the long villa runs it is normally quicker than excavation as well.
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 Ealing
- 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 Ealing
The Queen of the Suburbs on heavy clay: big Victorian villas with long runs, 1930s streets in Northfields, and the Common's trees exploring all of it.
Ealing, W5 and W13, grew as the Queen of the Suburbs in the late Victorian and Edwardian years: tall red-brick villas around the Common and Haven Green, long terraces off the Uxbridge Road, 1930s semis in Northfields and West Ealing, and lately a ring of new apartment blocks around the Broadway. The ground is heavy London clay, which swells and shrinks with the seasons and has spent a century easing Ealing’s pipe joints apart.
The villas are the classic call. Big gardens, long private runs, and the plane and lime trees that line every avenue sending roots into every opened joint. A drain that blocks every year is telling you about a specific joint and a specific tree, and the camera names both. Clearing buys a season; cutting the roots and lining the joint buys a generation.
Northfields and West Ealing are the interwar story: shallow runs under long gardens, grease and silt settling on a gentle fall, and extensions going over the run without anyone looking first. We survey before building work, jet rather than rod on anything that has blocked twice, and reline rather than dig wherever a garden or a tiled path is in the way. We cover Ealing, Northfields and Hanwell at any hour from the Brentford side of our patch.
We cover all of Ealing (W5, W13) — from Ealing Broadway, Ealing Common, Walpole Park and across Acton, Hanwell, Brentford. Being genuinely local means we already know what Ealing's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Ealing →