Plumbers & electricians in East Dulwich

Lordship Lane runs the length of the place, with Peckham Rye and its common off to the east and Dulwich Park to the west, and the streets in between were laid out and built up in a hurry between the eighteen eighties and the nineteen tens. Melbourne Grove, Heber Road, Whateley Road and the rest are largely the same house repeated: London stock brick, a bay at the front, a slate roof, and solid walls with no cavity anywhere in them.

Unlike Peckham next door, a good share of these are still whole family houses rather than converted flats, so the original arrangement has survived more often than not. The main body of the house is two rooms deep. Behind it sits the back addition, a narrow wing running out into the garden with the kitchen on the ground floor and the bathroom directly above it, and a strip of dead ground alongside that estate agents call the side return.

That wing is where nearly all the plumbing in the house ended up, and it is the part that was built cheapest and left most exposed. Emergency plumbing calls in SE22 land in the same twelve feet of building over and over again.

Why the back addition is the coldest and leakiest part of an East Dulwich terrace

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Look at the shape of the house and it explains itself. The main block is wide, with rooms either side of a party wall, so most of its pipework sits somewhere internal and reasonably warm. The back addition is the opposite: one room wide, which means three of its four walls face open air, built in solid brick with no cavity and usually with a thin uninsulated roof over the top. The bathroom sits at the head of that wing with cold wall to the left, cold wall to the right, cold wall behind, and the hot water has to travel the whole depth of the house to reach it.

So it fails differently to the rest of the house. The room never properly warms up, because one radiator is arguing with three exposed walls. The hot tap runs cold for a long time before it turns, because the water standing in that run has given its heat to the brickwork since you last used it. In a hard frost what freezes is the pipework clipped to the outside face of the rear elevation, and the boiler condensate is the usual casualty, which locks the boiler out with nothing actually wrong with the boiler. The soil stack is strapped to the back wall in the open air, cast iron on the older houses, and when a joint starts weeping the water runs down brick rather than into the gully, so what you notice first is a damp patch inside a wall or a stain on the kitchen ceiling.

None of that is solved by turning the heating up. What changes it is shortening or rerouting the run so hot water is not standing inside a cold external wall, lagging properly whatever has to stay outside, taking the condensate to an internal drain or upsizing it, and dealing with tired stack joints before the wall soaks any further. A rear extension or side return infill changes the picture again, and not only for the better: pipework that used to be outdoors is suddenly inside a heated room, which is good, while the old stack and the original runs often end up boxed in behind new plasterboard or buried under a new floor, which is not. If the back of the house is coming open, that is the moment to move those runs, plan the bathroom and shower room properly and get the electrical work into the walls, because everything in that wing is cheap while it is open and expensive once it is closed.