Plumbers & electricians in Sittingbourne

Milton Regis is the older place and Sittingbourne grew around it, rather than the other way about. Its High Street still carries timber framed buildings, the court hall among them, and behind that the ground falls away to Milton Creek, which is low and was marsh long before anyone built on it. East along the same creek, Murston was brickfields: clay dug, bricks burnt, barges carrying them up to London, and the brickmaker who ran the works put up the church there for the people who worked for him.

Kemsley is a different thing again. It was laid out in the nineteen twenties as a garden village for the new paper mill, built in one go to one plan, which is why its older streets still read as a single piece of thinking.

Then there is everything since. The town has absorbed a great deal of new building, on old industrial ground near the creek and on farmland at the edges, and the Kemsley side has taken hundreds of houses on what were fields between the railway line and Grovehurst Road. So a plumber in Sittingbourne works across three sets of assumptions inside a couple of miles: Victorian brick on creekside ground, an interwar model village, and estates finished recently enough that the roads and the drainage may not yet have been handed to anybody.

Why rainwater is held rather than carried away on a Sittingbourne estate

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The older streets deal with rain the blunt way. It goes into a gully or a downpipe, into a pipe, and away, and once it has left the boundary it is somebody else’s pipe. Estates built in the last twenty years or so are not permitted to work like that, because putting every new roof and driveway straight into the same system is how the places downstream of it end up under water. What goes in instead is sustainable drainage, which is a plain description rather than a technical one. Rain off the roofs and the road is sent to something that holds it: a soakaway or a crate system buried under a garden or a verge, a shallow grass basin at the end of a road, a swale, which is a long grassed channel that looks like landscaping and is not, or a pond that is a good deal deeper in February than it looks in July. Each of those is sized to take a storm and then let it go slowly, into the ground or onward at a trickle. The aim is not to move the water away. The aim is to slow it down, and how these systems behave, and how they fail, follows from that.

What it changes for the person living there is who to ring. One estate can carry a foul drain, a separate surface water drain, a highway gully in the kerb and an attenuation basin, and those four can each belong to a different party.

So when a gully backs up or a soakaway stops taking water, the practical question is whose it is before it is whose fault, and that depends on the estate and on whether the drainage was ever adopted. Some surface water sewers are taken over by the water company and some are not. Some roads are adopted by Kent County Council as highway authority and some estate roads never are. Kent County Council is also the lead local flood authority and is consulted on drainage for major development, though it says plainly that this role does not commit it as highway authority, which tells you how separate the two are. Our first move is to establish which system is which, and that is a matter of looking rather than guessing: where the gully discharges, whether the run is private, what the transfer and the estate management pack say. A private soakaway serving one house is a job, and it can be dug out, inspected and put right. An unadopted estate system serving forty houses is a conversation with a management company, and the useful thing we can do there is say what is wrong, so you are not paying for a survey to be told the same twice.