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 Hampton Hill
- 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 Hampton Hill
A High Street of Victorian terraces whose shared back-garden runs were laid once, in clay, and never looked at again.
Hampton Hill is the TW12 High Street and its side roads, running from Fulwell up to the Bushy Park gate. Above ground it is independent shops, a theatre and some of the nicest Victorian terraces in the borough. Below ground it is clay, laid in the 1880s and 1890s, shared between neighbours, and visited by the roots of every lime tree on the street.
What we see most here is the shared back-garden run. A Victorian terrace drains each house into a single pipe that runs along the rear gardens before it turns towards the sewer, so the house nearest the obstruction gets the overflow and the house that caused it may never know. Clearing it is quick. Explaining whose pipe it is takes longer, and we are happy to do both.
The flats above the High Street shops add a second pattern: small-bore pipes, several kitchens on one stack, and grease. That stack blocks on a timetable until it is jetted properly, and we would genuinely rather jet it once than rod it four times. We cover every Hampton Hill street, around the clock, from the Hampton and Teddington side of our patch.
We cover all of Hampton Hill (TW12) — from the High Street, Bushy Park (Hampton Hill Gate), Hampton Hill Playhouse and across Hampton, Teddington, Fulwell. Being genuinely local means we already know what Hampton Hill's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Hampton Hill →