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
- 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
Victorian cottages and waterworks-era streets with some of the oldest pipes on our patch.
Hampton has water history like nowhere else on our patch. The great Victorian waterworks along the riverfront supplied London its drinking water, and the streets of cottages built around them in the 1850s to 1890s got, naturally, Victorian drains. Parts of Hampton village and Hampton Hill are running waste through some of the oldest clay pipework we ever put a camera into, and honestly, the footage is beautiful. Hand-laid brick inspection chambers turn up under Hampton gardens like little cathedrals. (We photograph them. For the archive. It’s normal.)
Age brings character, and character brings blockages: lime-mortar joints that roots walk straight through, gentle sags where 150 years of ground settlement has let a pipe dip and collect grease, and the odd surprise where a long-gone builder connected something creatively. Between the cottages, the between-wars semis towards Hampton Hill add the usual extension-overload problem, kitchens working drains that were sized for a scullery.
The Bushy Park side contributes magnificent trees and their equally magnificent root systems. All of TW12, village to Hampton Wick borders, is covered 24/7. Old pipes deserve engineers who actually like them, and that is, without competition, us.
We cover all of Hampton (TW12) — from Hampton Court (up the road), Bushy Park, Hampton village and across Hampton Hill, Hampton Wick, Teddington. Being genuinely local means we already know what Hampton's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Hampton →