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 Osterley
- 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 Osterley
A 1930s suburb on heavy clay: salt-glazed runs under long gardens, and a park full of trees next door.
Osterley is the leafy 1930s corner of TW7, laid out around the Piccadilly line station with the park on one side and the Great West Road on the other. The houses are consistent, the gardens are long, and the drains are salt-glazed clay runs that travel the length of those gardens before they find the sewer. That geometry is the whole story: twenty metres of shallow pipe gives a blockage plenty of room to hide, and a rod from the gully rarely gets there.
The ground does its bit. Osterley sits on London clay, which swells in wet winters and shrinks in dry summers, and ninety years of that has eased the joints apart. A displaced joint catches debris, lets roots in from the park-side trees and, eventually, drops. The camera shows all three stages clearly, and the earlier we see it the cheaper the fix.
We also get called before building work. A lot of Osterley semis are getting extensions over the original run, and a survey first is far cheaper than a collapsed drain under a new kitchen floor. We cover Osterley from Isleworth and Hounslow, at any hour.
We cover all of Osterley (TW7) — from Osterley Park, Osterley station, the Great West Road and across Isleworth, Hounslow, Brentford. Being genuinely local means we already know what Osterley's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Osterley →