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 Surbiton
- 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 Surbiton
Victorian villas turned into flats: one house, four kitchens and a single clay run that was never asked.
Surbiton is the Surrey bank’s Victorian suburb, KT5 and KT6, built around the railway and the river, with avenues of tall villas off Victoria Road and 1930s semis filling Berrylands and the edge of Tolworth. Most of the villas are flats now, and that conversion is the whole drainage story. One house, built for one family and one scullery sink, now has four kitchens, four bathrooms and the same single clay run to the sewer it had in 1890.
So Surbiton blocks from the top down and floods from the bottom up. Grease and wipes from the upper flats collect in the one shared run, and the ground-floor flat is the first to know. We clear from the external chamber, jet rather than rod because a hole through the grease lasts a month and a clean pipe lasts years, and we give the freeholder or managing agent a straight account of what came out, since the next conversation is about who pays.
The avenues’ plane trees take care of the rest, finding every joint that a century of ground movement has opened. We cover Surbiton, Berrylands and Long Ditton at any hour from the Kingston side of our patch.
We cover all of Surbiton (KT5, KT6) — from Surbiton station, Victoria Road, Claremont Gardens and across Kingston upon Thames, Tolworth, Long Ditton. Being genuinely local means we already know what Surbiton's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Surbiton →