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 Hammersmith
- 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 Hammersmith
Brackenbury's Victorian terraces, Georgian riverside houses on the Mall, mansion blocks and new towers: four drainage systems in one postcode.
Hammersmith, W6, packs four kinds of drainage into one postcode. Brackenbury Village and the streets around Ravenscourt Park are Victorian terraces on shared clay runs, converted and extended for a century. The Lower and Upper Mall have Georgian and Victorian houses on the river with some of the oldest private drainage in west London. The main roads carry mansion blocks with shared stacks, and the Broadway is ringed with new towers whose communal runs are still finding out what the builders left in them.
Terrace calls are the familiar converted-house story: four kitchens on a pipe laid for one, grease from the top flat, a flooded kitchen in the garden flat. Riverside calls add a high water table that lifts silt into every moved joint each winter, and the question of where a very old private drain becomes Thames Water’s lateral. The camera answers both.
King Street and the Broadway are a grease story. Restaurants and flats above shops on small old pipes produce fatbergs we find professionally fascinating and tenants find expensive, and a planned jetting schedule on a commercial run beats the Saturday-night flood every time. We cover Hammersmith and Brackenbury at any hour from the Chiswick and Barnes side of our patch.
We cover all of Hammersmith (W6) — from Hammersmith Broadway, King Street, Hammersmith Bridge and across Chiswick, Fulham, Shepherd's Bush. Being genuinely local means we already know what Hammersmith's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Hammersmith →