This is relining country. Georgian and Victorian houses with listed walls, old brick paths and gardens that took decades to make cannot take excavation, and lining the pipe from inside the existing chambers repairs it without touching any of that.
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 Petersham
- 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 Petersham
A Georgian village on the flood plain: conservation-area gardens, two centuries of pipework and a water table that sits just under the lawn.
Petersham is the village in TW10 between Richmond Hill and Ham, Georgian houses and Victorian cottages set beside the meadows that the Thames floods on purpose. It is one of the prettiest places we work and, from a drain’s point of view, one of the dampest. The water table here is never far below the grass, and it rises every winter into the backfill around pipes that were laid before anyone had heard of a camera.
The result is silt. A Petersham run with a dropped joint, and most have one by now, lets fine sediment in each wet season until the bore closes. Clearing it is straightforward. Stopping it means finding the joint, and on camera the entry point is usually obvious: a lip of clay with a little delta of silt behind it.
Everything we do here is done with the garden in mind. Surveys run through the existing chambers, repairs are relining rather than digging, and the footage is kept for the insurer, because period houses on a flood plain do end up claiming. We cover Petersham, Ham and the Richmond Hill slopes at any hour, and we promise not to put a van on the meadow.
We cover all of Petersham (TW10) — from Petersham Meadows, Richmond Park (Petersham Gate), River Lane and across Richmond, Ham, Richmond Hill. Being genuinely local means we already know what Petersham's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Petersham →