Drainage Services in Bournemouth

Bournemouth grew from almost nothing into a major resort town in the space of about seventy years, and its drainage still reflects that. The Victorian and Edwardian core around the town centre, Boscombe and Westbourne was laid out with salt-glazed clay pipework and, in places, combined sewers that take foul water and rainwater in the same run. Behind that core sit inter-war suburbs in Winton, Charminster and Moordown, and then post-war and modern infill towards Kinson and Throop — three different eras of pipework, often connected to one another.

The ground beneath the town is largely Bagshot and Branksome sand: free-draining, which is good news for soakaways, but easily washed out. Where a clay joint has opened or a pipe has cracked, fine sand migrates into the drain and voids form around it, which is why Bournemouth blockages so often turn out to be a silted, partly collapsed section rather than a simple fat or wipe blockage. The chines and the steep drop to the seafront also mean long, fast-falling runs that scour at the top and deposit at the bottom.

Add heavy tree cover in Talbot Woods and along the older avenues, and root ingress into those Victorian clay joints is a routine finding. We CCTV survey first, clear with high-pressure jetting, and where the pipe has failed we reline rather than dig up mature gardens and block-paved driveways.