Front gardens in Kew are small, paved and often shared with a neighbour's run, so nobody wants a trench. Relining fixes a cracked clay pipe from the inside through the existing chamber and the York stone stays where it is.
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 Kew
- 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 Kew
Riverside Victorian and Edwardian terraces on clay runs, with the water table rising to meet them every winter.
Kew is Richmond’s quieter neighbour and, under the pavement, its older sibling. The terraces between Kew Green, Sandycombe Road and North Sheen went up in the decades either side of 1900 on salt-glazed clay drains, and those drains still do the job, mostly. What has changed is the ground. The Thames sits at the end of almost every street here, and each winter the water table rises into the backfill around the pipes, lifting silt into any joint that has moved. That is why a Kew gully that behaves all summer backs up in the first wet week of November.
The trees do their part too. Kew’s plane trees and the mature gardens off Lichfield Road push roots towards the one warm, wet thing underground, and a hairline gap in a clay collar is all the invitation they need. We clear root blockages across TW9 every month, and the ones that stay cleared are the ones where the camera found the entry point and the pipe was lined.
There is a practical Kew point as well: a lot of the housing stock here is shared. Semi-detached pairs and terraces often drain into one run before it reaches the sewer, so a blockage in one garden floods the neighbour first. We are used to explaining who pays and why, and to doing the survey that proves it. We are local, we answer at any hour, and a Kew drain is one of our favourite problems.
We cover all of Kew (TW9) — from Kew Gardens, Kew Green, Kew Bridge and across Richmond, North Sheen, Mortlake. Being genuinely local means we already know what Kew's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Kew →