Plumbers & electricians in Greenwich

The town centre sits on the river beside the Cutty Sark and the Old Royal Naval College, with the park climbing behind it to the Observatory. West of the park, Crooms Hill and Royal Hill carry Georgian and early Victorian terraces up the slope, and behind the station the Ashburnham Triangle is street after street of Victorian terrace. East of the park, Maze Hill runs along the wall past Vanbrugh Castle. North of all of it, the Greenwich Peninsula is a different century entirely.

So SE10 holds two housing stocks in one postcode. The older part is tall and narrow: three or four storeys, basements, back additions, a chimney breast in most rooms, cast iron soil stacks on the rear, and much of it divided into flats decades ago. What makes Greenwich different from anywhere else with the same houses is that the outside is protected. A boiler repair in Greenwich is ordinary work. Moving that boiler is not, and a blocked drain in Greenwich is often as much about the age of the pipe as what went down the sink.

Why the boiler position is the whole job in a Greenwich conservation area

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The designation is not decoration. West Greenwich, East Greenwich and the Ashburnham Triangle are conservation areas carrying Article 4 directions, which withdraw permitted development rights available elsewhere, and the town centre sits in or beside the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. Houses on Crooms Hill, Royal Hill and Maze Hill are listed, and there the protection covers the inside as well as the front. So the exterior is close to fixed. A flue, a condensate pipe, a new soil connection or an external unit cannot go wherever is convenient, and on an elevation facing the street it usually cannot go at all.

That turns the position of the boiler from a detail into the whole job. A condensing boiler has to vent its combustion products and drain its condensate, which is acidic water needing a continuous fall to a drain. In a Georgian townhouse with a protected front and an overlooked rear, the terminations you are actually allowed can come down to one or two. People get quoted for a like for like swap, then find the old chimney flue will not serve a modern appliance and no permitted wall for the new one.

The way through is to design the route first and the boiler second. A room sealed fanned flue will run several metres, so the appliance can sit well inside the property and vent at the rear or through the roof where nothing shows from the street. An unused chimney can sometimes carry a proprietary flue system, and condensate that cannot go outside can be taken to an internal stack or lifted to one by a pump. In a listed interior the pipe runs follow voids and chases that already exist rather than cutting original fabric. Some of it needs consent first, so the sensible order is to establish what is permitted, then price the work.