Drainage Work in Northampton, priced in writing before anything starts.
Drainage in the older Northampton streets carries a legacy nobody planned for: the yards behind these houses were drained as working spaces, not as gardens.
That produces a system with more in it than a modern layout would have. Gullies serving areas that are no longer hard surfaced, channels that once took washdown from a yard, and connections into runs that served a workshop as well as a house. Some of it is still working, some was abandoned in place, and very little of it is recorded anywhere.
So before designing an extension over any of it we put a camera down. An hour with a survey tells you what is live, what is redundant, what condition it is in and where it actually goes, and it turns a set of assumptions into a drawing. On these plots it regularly finds a run nobody knew existed.
Shared runs are the second consideration. A single line frequently serves several houses in a terrace, so work on it affects neighbours and needs handling openly rather than quietly.
Where a run belongs to the water company rather than to you, and since 2011 a great many do, building over or close to it needs consent granted before the concrete goes in. Our drainage work page covers surveys, repairs and new connections.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the West Northamptonshire Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
Process, specification and what moves the price are set out on our drainage work page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Northampton street to the next.
Every connection is tested before it is covered and recorded on a drawing you keep. On a system with this much redundant historic pipework in it, that record is genuinely useful to whoever opens the ground next.
Where a run crosses a neighbour’s ground or serves several houses, the permissions and notices are agreed before the spade goes in rather than after.
A connection into an existing manhole on a tight plot can mean a deep, narrow excavation next to a boundary wall built with very little foundation, and that is a job for shoring and care rather than speed.
Redundant historic pipework is worth capping properly rather than leaving open. An abandoned run under a new extension is a route for water and for vermin, and it is the kind of thing nobody remembers is there until it causes a problem.
Part of our wider building work in Northampton.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
