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 Strawberry Hill
- 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 Strawberry Hill
Edwardian and 1930s semis on the slope down to the river, where a long run and a shallow fall meet mature street trees.
Strawberry Hill is the leafy stretch of TW1 between Twickenham and Teddington, named for Horace Walpole’s Gothic house and built up, mostly, in the Edwardian and interwar years. From a drainage point of view it has a particular character: decent-sized semis on generous plots, long private drains running from the back of the house to the sewer, and a shallow gradient down towards the Thames that never quite gives the water the push it needs.
That shallow fall is the local culprit. A clay run with a gentle slope lets grease and silt settle on the invert instead of washing through, and over a few years the bore narrows until one Sunday it closes. The street trees finish the job: the limes and cherries that make Waldegrave Road and its neighbours so pleasant above ground have been exploring the pipe joints beneath them for a century.
We also see a lot of extension work here, with new kitchens and side returns built over original runs that nobody surveyed first. If you are about to build, a camera survey costs a fraction of discovering the problem after the slab is poured. We are based in Twickenham, so Strawberry Hill is a few minutes away at any hour, and a long, lazy drain is something we genuinely enjoy sorting out properly.
We cover all of Strawberry Hill (TW1, TW2) — from Strawberry Hill House, St Mary's University, Waldegrave Road and across Twickenham, Teddington, Whitton. Being genuinely local means we already know what Strawberry Hill's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Strawberry Hill →