Plumbers & electricians in Northfleet & Gravesend West

Northfleet grew on chalk and cement, and it was built for the people who worked in both. That means long rows of Victorian and Edwardian terraces, mostly two up two down with a rear addition, running in grids down towards the river.

The western half of Gravesend continues the same pattern until you reach the town centre. Uniform housing is easy housing to work on, because the layout of one is the layout of the next and the fault on one is generally the fault developing on the next.

Soil stacks on a Victorian terrace

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The rear addition on a terrace of this age is where the bathroom and the kitchen ended up, and the soil stack usually runs down the outside of it, in the corner where the addition meets the main back wall. On the older houses it is cast iron. On the ones that have been touched since the seventies it is plastic bolted to whatever was there before.

Cast iron fails from the inside out and it fails quietly. The first symptom is normally a damp patch on an internal wall, or a smell in the back bedroom, long before anything is visible outside. By the time rust is showing through the paint on the outside, the pipe has usually been leaking internally for a while.

The other thing that catches people here is that a stack often serves the house next door as well, or runs within inches of it. That makes access a conversation with a neighbour rather than a decision you make alone, and it is worth having that conversation before the scaffold arrives rather than on the morning.