Plumbers & electricians in Rainham

Rainham grew off the back of the railway, which arrived in 1858, and then again once the Chatham Main Line was electrified in 1959. The old centre sits on the A2, the Watling Street route between London and Canterbury, on the dip slope of the North Downs. North of that the land falls away through Lower Rainham towards the Medway and ends in creek and saltings at Otterham Quay. Berengrave Chalk Pit, a nature reserve off Berengrave Lane today, says plainly enough what lies under the gardens. A village of four hundred and twenty two souls in 1801 had become a town of more than thirty thousand by the 2011 census.

Most of that arrived within living memory. Twydall was farmland into the middle of the last century, and the estate covering it went up mostly in the nineteen fifties, taking families out of Brompton while that was cleared, with a parade of shops at Twydall Green and a Woolworths trading in it by 1960. Parkwood is later, laid out across the sixties and seventies over woodland on the southern edge, and Wigmore runs beside it down to junction four of the M2.

Three estates, three decades, one set of habits. Where a whole district is drawn by the same hands in the same few years, the bathrooms inside it were planned the same way too.

Why the soil pipe decides a Twydall bathroom refit

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Estate housing of this period was drawn with a small bathroom and, next door to it, a WC barely wider than its own door, the two of them sharing a dividing wall and, more to the point, sharing a single soil stack. Take the wall out and you finally have a room that holds a bath, a basin and a shower cubicle, which is why the job is so common here. Almost everybody planning it starts by deciding where they want the toilet to sit. That is the wrong end to start from. A WC discharges into a hundred and ten millimetre branch, and that branch has to reach the stack over a short run at a fall that stays consistent the whole way. Too shallow and solids sit in the pipe. Too steep and the water runs away from what it is meant to be carrying, which blocks a pipe just as reliably as no fall at all. Corners do the same, so the bends want to be swept rather than square, and the run wants to sit as near the shortest sensible line as the joists allow. Move a toilet half a metre and nothing much changes. Move it two metres and it is usually still fine. Put it on the far wall of the new combined room, past the door, and the pipe that would have to serve it often cannot exist in the depth of floor there is to play with.

From inside the house this looks like a sketch on the back of an envelope that a plumber keeps frowning at. The suite is chosen, the tiles are chosen, a fitter is booked for the Monday, and the one question nobody asked is where the waste goes.

Two things settle it, and both get checked before a suite is ordered. The first is the floor. A suspended timber floor gives a void to run in, although notching and drilling joists has rules of its own and a hundred and ten millimetre pipe will not cross a joist at all, so the branch follows the joists rather than cutting through them. A solid concrete floor, which is what you meet in plenty of the flats and later blocks around Parkwood, offers nothing, and the pipe then has to be boxed above floor level or the room raised. The second is whether gravity will do the work. Where it will not, a macerator is a genuine option with genuine conditions attached: a permanent electrical supply, a noise you can hear in a quiet house, and a strict limit on what may be put down it, which rules out wipes and most of what gets flushed without thinking. Ventilation decides the rest. A combined bathroom with no openable window has to be ventilated mechanically, at fifteen litres a second with an overrun of fifteen minutes after the light goes off, and the fan needs a duct route out of the building. Waste first, then the fan, then the suite. In that order it is a straightforward week. In the other order it is a refit redesigned on the second morning.