Drainage Services in Blandford

Blandford Forum was rebuilt almost entirely after the fire of 1731, which gives the town a remarkably uniform Georgian core — and drainage that was retro-fitted into it much later. Victorian clay pipework runs shallow beneath the market place and the surrounding streets, often within listed curtilage, and displaced joints in that pipework are the single most common finding on surveys here.

The River Stour sets the water table. Blandford St Mary, Charlton Marshall and the low ground either side of the bridge sit on floodplain gravels where groundwater rises steeply through winter, drowning surface-water outfalls and rendering soakaways ineffective until levels drop. Up on the chalk at Pimperne and towards the downs the picture reverses: free-draining ground, good percolation, but long private drain runs and mature trees that reach open joints quickly.

Our approach in Blandford is to establish groundwater levels alongside pipe condition, because rebuilding a soakaway in saturated floodplain gravel rarely solves anything. High-pressure jetting clears root and silt blockages in the older clay runs, no-dig lining allows repairs beneath the Georgian frontages without excavation, and for the surrounding villages we percolation test before specifying septic drainage fields.