Plumbers & electricians in Aylesford and Larkfield

Aylesford is the old part of ME20, a village on the Medway with a ragstone bridge whose pointed arches are largely fourteenth century, the Carmelite priory known as The Friars just upstream of it, and Kit’s Coty House on the downs above, a neolithic burial chamber standing there thousands of years before any of the housing was thought of. Almost everything else in the district is twentieth century. Larkfield appears in Domesday Book as Lavrochesfel and then stays small for eight hundred years, until Malling Rural District Council laid out the Tree and Bird estates in 1961, the M20 arrived in the nineteen seventies and the building never really stopped. Lunsford Park went in north of the motorway with its roads named after poets, and Martin Square became the middle of it.

Eccles is stranger than it looks. Thomas Cubitt put a steam powered brickyard and cement works on two riverside farms, and the works closed in 1941.

New Hythe is former paper mill land. The mill was one of the largest in Europe, the railway station opened in 1929 to serve it, and when it shut in 2015 the site went over to business parks, with part of the riverside ground now being turned into homes. Up the road at Aylesford, the Royal British Legion Village grew out of Preston Hall, bought in 1920 to shelter and treat ex-servicemen, its cottages given verandas so beds could be wheeled outside. That pattern holds across the district. Houses, older cottages, blocks of flats, maisonettes over garages and new apartment buildings all sit within a few streets of each other, and they are not the same kind of building to work in.

Why a new pipe in a Larkfield flat is also a hole in a fire wall

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A block of flats is built on the assumption that a fire stays where it starts. The walls between one home and the next, and the floor between one home and the one below, are not simply walls and floors, they are the edges of a compartment, and they are meant to hold for long enough that everybody else in the building can get out. Every pipe and every cable passing through one of those edges is a hole in it. That much is unavoidable, because water has to arrive and waste has to leave, so what matters is what the hole is filled with afterwards. It has to hold as long as the wall or the floor it sits in, which means fire rated collars, sleeves, batts and sealants made for the purpose, rather than a squirt of expanding foam and a smear of filler over the top. Plastic pipe is the particular difficulty. Copper stays roughly where it was put, but plastic softens, slumps and burns away, and once it has gone the hole is wide open and the compartment has stopped being one. That is the difficulty in one sentence, because the thing filling the hole is the thing that disappears first. An intumescent collar exists for exactly that. It is a band clamped round the pipe that swells hard when it gets hot and crushes the pipe shut as the plastic gives way, so the gap closes at the moment the pipe stops holding it open.

None of this announces itself. A hole round a pipe is behind boxing or above a ceiling, and the hints are indirect, a draught out of the airing cupboard, next door’s television clearer than it ought to be, or a gap you can see daylight through once the bath panel is off. Anything wide enough to pass sound and draught will pass smoke as well.

What resolves it is the same in every case, which is that making good is part of the job and not an extra. Ordinary work makes these holes. A new soil pipe, a radiator circuit dropped through a floor, a waste run into a kitchen, a cable pulled across a ceiling void, any of them can quietly undo something that was done correctly when the building went up. The honest part is where it stops being a plumbing question. In a leasehold flat the wall or the floor may not be yours to alter, the freeholder or the managing agent may have a view, and responsibility varies from building to building, so it is worth asking before the work rather than after. We do not survey fire stopping and we do not sign anything off. What we do is avoid leaving a compartment open behind us.