Winchester drainage and leak detection

Winchester is a city built in layers, and its drainage reflects that. Beneath the cathedral quarter and the streets running down to the Itchen, Saxon and medieval cellars sit above – and sometimes astride – Victorian clay drainage that was itself laid through far older ground. Add Southern Water's hard chalk supply (270 to 310 ppm CaCO3) and you have a stock where scale, settlement and a century of patch-repair all show up on a CCTV survey.

Most of the pre-1900 core – and that is most of central Winchester – falls inside a conservation area, which shapes how we work. Excavation near listed frontages, the colleges and the Cathedral Close is planned to protect historic surfaces, and we favour no-dig relining over open-cut wherever a drain run will take it. Out in Bishop's Waltham, New Alresford and the newer Whiteley estates the picture changes to inter-war and modern stock, where the work is more about root ingress and tired clay-to-plastic junctions than archaeology.

Our Winchester visits are scheduled project work, not emergency callouts: a booked window between 9am and 5pm, typically one to two working days out. Drainage covers jetting, CCTV mapping and relining; leak detection uses thermal, acoustic and tracer-gas methods with a written report suitable for an insurer. You get a fixed price once we have surveyed, and there is no callout fee – details on /pricing.