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 Shepperton
- 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 Shepperton
Riverside village where old village drains meet a floodplain water table.
Shepperton is the prettiest place we work and, drainage-wise, one of the most interesting (we know how that sounds; we’re at peace with it). The village core around Church Square and the lock is genuinely old, and some of its drainage is too: narrow runs, quirky private connections, and pipes that predate any map Thames Water holds. Finding out where a Church Road drain actually goes is half detective work, which is why the survey camera earns its keep here more than anywhere.
The other half of the story is the river. Much of TW17 towards the lock and the Thames Path is floodplain, with a water table to match. Older joints let groundwater seep in, so runs sit part-full, and a modest blockage backs up faster than the same blockage would on higher ground in, say, Hounslow. When the Thames runs high, the margin shrinks further. Village memory of 2014 does the explaining for us.
So our honest local advice: Shepperton drains reward acting early. A slow gully in October is worth a phone call, not a winter of hoping. And if river water has actually entered your home, that side (pumping out, drying, insurance evidence) is handled brilliantly by Emergency Plumbers TW, while we sort the drains. One of us is excited about the fatberg; it’s not them.
We cover all of Shepperton (TW17) — from Shepperton Lock, Church Square, Shepperton Studios and across Sunbury, Walton-on-Thames, Laleham. Being genuinely local means we already know what Shepperton's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Shepperton →