Leak Detection in South East London

Cottage Estates and the Plumbing That Came Later

A remarkable amount of this housing was designed as a set piece. The London County Council built Downham between 1924 and 1930, 7,000 homes on land between Catford and Bromley, with the Bellingham estate laid out nearby on garden city lines around a central green. At Eltham, the Progress Estate was thrown up in 1915 to house skilled hands from the Royal Arsenal, a mixture of 1,086 houses and 212 flats in Garden City manner, and it has been a conservation area since 1975. Archibald Cameron Corbett had already added around 3,000 terraced houses between Catford and Hither Green between 1897 and 1913. Estates of that kind look alike from the pavement and are nothing alike behind the front door, because a century of new kitchens, extensions and boilers has left heating pipes laid into solid floors and pipework boxed in behind bath panels.

Rivers, Bournes and Marshes: When Damp Is Not a Pipe

Nowhere in London is it easier to mistake outside water for inside water. The Ravensbourne runs through Catford, Ladywell and Lewisham, where the Quaggy joins it, and the Environment Agency still maintains flood warning areas along it from Bellingham to Catford and at Lewisham. In the south of Croydon, the Caterham Bourne runs through chalk and appears only when the groundwater rises far enough, which it did at the start of 2014, putting water into homes and shutting the Brighton Road and the Godstone Road for weeks. Thamesmead was built on former marshes that had flooded in 1953, which is why its original design lifted the living accommodation to first floor level and gave the ground over to garages.

A wet wall in any of those places proves nothing on its own. The first job is arithmetic rather than equipment: if the meter does not move over an hour with the house quiet, and the boiler gauge holds across several cold mornings, your plumbing is not losing water. Where that is the answer, a damp and moisture survey at £250 to £450 maps the pattern and the report points you at a drainage or waterproofing contractor instead of a plumber.

Heat Networks and the Call to Make First

District heating is more established here than anywhere else in the capital. Southwark Council alone runs more than 100 heat networks serving around 17,000 homes, several Bermondsey estates take their heat from the South East London Combined Heat and Power plant, and an energy centre on Greenwich Peninsula is designed to serve an eventual 15,700 properties. A home on one of those networks has no boiler of its own. Heat reaches the flat from central plant by way of an interface unit tucked into a cupboard, and the pipes on one side of that unit may be someone else's responsibility while those on the other side are yours. So the order matters: report loss of heating or hot water to the landlord, managing agent or heat supplier first, because the shared network is theirs. Water appearing inside the flat, from a supply pipe, a waste connection or an appliance, is the part an independent survey settles, and the report names the pipe.

Long Plots, Buried Pipes and Where Responsibility Ends

Bromley is the largest London borough by area at 59 square miles, and plot sizes follow. In Chislehurst, Bickley and Keston the private supply pipe can run a considerable distance from the gate to the front door, often under gravel, a sloping garden or a drive laid over it decades later. Petts Wood shows how deliberately some of it was planned. Its developer, Basil Scruby, started work in the late 1920s and put £6,000 of his own towards a Southern Railway station, then set the larger houses on the eastern side of the tracks.

Wherever the house is, the boundary rule is the same. The water company owns the main and the connection up to your boundary, and you own the pipe from there into the building, including anything shared with a neighbour. Thames Water has been replacing ageing mains around Bexleyheath, along Bexley High Street and on roads in Sidcup, but a new main in the road does nothing for an old private pipe, which in an interwar semi may still be lead or early copper. Those are traced acoustically, or with tracer gas where the run is plastic or deep, and priced at £300 to £500.