Wimbledon Village gardens, conservation-area frontages and the odd tennis court are exactly what relining exists to protect. We repair the run from inside the existing chambers and the garden never knows.
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 Wimbledon
- 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 Wimbledon
Two towns in one postcode: the Village on the hill with long runs under big gardens, and the terraces and flats below it on shared Victorian clay.
Wimbledon, SW19, is two places with different pipes. Up the hill, the Village and the Common are large Victorian and Edwardian houses on big plots, with long private runs, mature gardens and the Common’s oaks exploring every joint. Down the hill, the Broadway, South Wimbledon and Wimbledon Park are Victorian and Edwardian terraces, many converted into flats, plus post-war estates and new blocks around the station. We ask which Wimbledon you are in before we choose the van.
Hill calls are about distance and roots. A blockage on a thirty-metre run under a lawn is nowhere near a gully, rods will not reach it, and the camera has to find it first. Repeat blockages are almost always a root mat at a joint the clay soil has opened, and lining that joint is what ends the annual visit. With basements and extensions going in all over the hill, a survey before the works is the cheapest decision in the project.
Down-the-hill calls are about sharing. Converted terraces put four kitchens on one Victorian run and the ground-floor flat is the first to know when the top flat pours the fat away. We clear from the external chamber, jet rather than rod, and give the freeholder footage rather than an opinion. We cover all of SW19 at any hour from the Putney and Kingston side of our patch.
We cover all of Wimbledon (SW19) — from Wimbledon Village, the Common, the Broadway and across Southfields, Raynes Park, Putney. Being genuinely local means we already know what Wimbledon's drains are made of, and how fast we can be at your door.More about drains in Wimbledon →