Plumber & drainage engineers in Soho

Soho packs a lot into a small grid. Within W1D and W1F there are restaurants, bars, members’ clubs, post-production studios, shops and flats, often stacked in the same building. Much of the older stock is Georgian townhouses, many of them listed, sitting alongside Victorian and twentieth-century commercial blocks. All of Soho is in the City of Westminster and most of it falls within a conservation area, so any work that touches the fabric of a building needs care.

Drainage here is old and heavily used. Many buildings still rely on original clay drains and cast-iron soil stacks, and it is common for one drain run to serve several properties before it reaches the sewer. Soho also has a very high concentration of restaurant kitchens, which puts constant pressure on the system from fat, oil and grease. Even with grease traps fitted, deposits build up inside pipes over time and cause slow drainage, smells and eventually a full blockage.

Soho has a place in drainage history too. In 1854 Dr John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to the water pump on Broad Street, now Broadwick Street, and helped change how London thought about water and sewage. Much of the Victorian sewer network built in the decades that followed is still in use. When we are called out, we clear the blockage with rods or high-pressure water jetting, then run a CCTV camera through the pipe to check for cracks, displaced joints or collapse, and confirm the price of any repair before we start.

Access in Soho needs planning. Streets are narrow, many are one-way, loading is restricted and some streets have timed traffic restrictions. The area is inside the Congestion Charge zone and ULEZ. Our engineers know the grid and carry equipment the last stretch on foot where a van cannot stop. We work 24 hours a day, so for restaurants and bars we can often do the job after closing or before deliveries start, which keeps disruption to trade down.