Plumbers & electricians in Tunbridge Wells

The district takes in the town centre itself, the streets around St James' and part of Culverden, where the ward boundary runs on into TN4. It is compact rather than sprawling. The spa town grew fast in the eighteen twenties and thirties, and the houses from that period are stucco terraces and villas, many of them tall, with basements below and attic storeys above. Decimus Burton laid out the Calverley estate from eighteen twenty-eight, and Calverley Park, with its villas round the open ground, is still the landmark of that scheme. Later in the century the building moved to brick, and the Victorian streets filled in around the older core.

Much of the centre sits inside the Royal Tunbridge Wells conservation area, and a large share of the big houses have long since been divided into flats.

Both facts matter to a plumber. A house that began with one kitchen and perhaps no bathroom at all may now hold three or four of each, and every one of them was fed and drained through floors that were built for none of it.

Pipe runs through old timber joists

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Every time a pipe crosses a joist, the joist gets weaker.

Timber floors in houses of this age are joists spanning wall to wall with boards across the top, and the strength of a joist lives mostly in its top and bottom edges. That is why the rules of thumb builders and building control still work to (they used to appear as diagrams in Approved Document A, and timber design guidance still sets out the same zones) are written the way they are. A notch goes in the top edge only, no deeper than an eighth of the joist depth, and only between about seven and twenty-five hundredths of the span out from the wall. A hole is drilled on the centre line, where the timber is doing least, no wider than a quarter of the depth, between about a quarter and four tenths of the span, and at least three diameters from the next hole. Now picture a stucco house that was given its first bathroom in the eighteen nineties, a heating system after the war, a second bathroom in the seventies and then a conversion into flats. Each generation of trade lifted boards and cut its own way across, usually straight across, usually as a notch because a notch is quicker, and usually wherever the pipe happened to want to go. Old notches sit beside new ones, deep ones sit in the middle of the span, and some joists have been cut so often that what is left is little more than the bottom edge.

What you notice is a floor that bounces or dips when you walk across one part of a room, a board that squeaks where it never used to, or a crack opening across the ceiling of the flat below. The honest answer to the next pipe is to follow the joists rather than cross them where the layout allows, to drill rather than notch, to keep to the zones, and to use plastic pipe where it can be threaded through a run of holes that copper would never go through in one length. Where the boards come up and the joists are already butchered, the job stops there, because strengthening them is work for a builder or a structural engineer and not for a plumber, and it is better to find that out before the new bathroom goes on top. In a listed house there may be consent questions as well, and those are worth asking first.