Plumbers & electricians in Yalding and Wateringbury

Yalding is one of the largest hop parishes in the country and it still looks like one. Orchards and oasts on every side, a ragstone church, timber framed and weatherboarded cottages along the High Street, and two medieval bridges, Twyford and Town, carrying the road over the Medway and the Beult. The smaller places belong to the same parish, Laddingford and Benover and Queen Street, each of them a few houses and a pub on a lane. Plenty of the oasts are homes now, converted at different dates and to different standards, and that shows up in how they are serviced more than in how they look.

North east of the village the A26 runs along the valley through Nettlestead, Wateringbury and Teston. Wateringbury got a station on the Medway Valley Line in the eighteen forties and had two breweries, and the brick terraces and villas arrived with them. Teston keeps a six arch ragstone bridge over the Medway and Barham Court, a country house divided long ago into offices and flats.

Higher up and away from the water sit Mereworth and West Peckham. Mereworth was physically moved in the seventeen twenties so the new Palladian house would not have to look at it, and the church was rebuilt on the new site about twenty years later.

Why the height of the services decides how a Yalding house recovers

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A flood does not damage a house evenly. It damages whatever was low. Water at a few hundred millimetres will finish a boiler standing on a kitchen floor, a consumer unit fitted at waist height by the front door, the gas and electricity meters in a cupboard under the stairs, a pump serving a shower or a cellar, and every socket set at skirting level, and it will leave the first floor of the same house untouched. In the valley stock around Yalding, Laddingford and Nettlestead that list is close to a description of where those things sit. Cottages built long before any of it existed had the services added wherever there was a spare wall, which generally meant the ground floor and generally meant low down. Converted oasts and barns tend to have the plant in the lowest corner, because that is where the old stowage or the store was. Newer houses put the boiler in a ground floor utility room and the board beside the door. None of that is a fault in the work. It is that the most expensive items in the building are routinely the ones nearest the floor.

What it looks like afterwards is a house that dries out faster than it comes back. Plaster and floors can be dealt with. A soaked boiler and a soaked board are what keep the power off and the heating dead and the family somewhere else.

So the change worth making is height, and the moment to make it is when something is already open. A kitchen coming out, a boiler being replaced, a floor lifted, wiring being disturbed: those are the points at which a board can go up a wall, sockets can be raised above the skirting, a pump can go on a plinth, and a boiler position can be chosen that is not the floor of the lowest room. Decided on its own, as a job in its own right, it almost never gets done. Drains are the other half of it, because water comes back up through gullies and toilets as well as in under a door, and non return protection on a drain is a real option with real limits, since it has to be reachable and kept clean and it does nothing at all while the ground outside is under water. How much of this is available to you is a per property question. A flue has to terminate somewhere it is allowed to, a gas run has to reach, the meter position is not yours to choose, and a timber framed cottage only gives you so much wall to cut into. None of it stops a flood. It changes what is destroyed, and how soon the house can be lived in again.