A customer care project where we installed strategic drainage solutions to revitalise a waterlogged garden that had been unusable for many years.

So far during 2024, the UK has experienced contrasting rainfall patterns, and it has been wetter overall than in previous years. With this, we have been called out to several Customer Care projects where there have been drainage issues resulting in flooded gardens.

For this project, we were asked to help with a plot that was the lowest on the site, which was therefore handling the runoff, and unfortunately did not have sufficient drainage.

The brief was to resolve the flooding issue, extend the patio to help appease the homeowners’ requests, install raised planters and returf the remainder of the space after addressing soil levels and soil type.
Upon inspection, we found the grass was not healthy and grew sporadically. The patio flooded, creating large puddles. Soakaway was backed up to the hilt. A very large shelf of blue clay was found, and the flooding extended to the front driveaway.

Our first task was to fully uncover the existing soakaway which we did predominantly by hand due to limited access to the garden. Whilst digging this out, we uncovered redundant piping found buried, which we removed along with the old patio.

Additional drainage was installed from the highest point of the garden to sync with running into the crate soakaway system, which we extended by another crate. We then lifted part of the driveway and installed a channel to run from the soakaway crates into the driveaway using relevant pipework, which was all wrapped with a permeable membrane to allow quick depletion of water on the main slope runoff.

Because of the clay, we sifted the soil to remove as much clay as possible and a vast part of the garden was backfilled with 

Thanks to the team’s knowledge and experience, we were able to turn this project around without any issues, and the final result was a fully functional family garden that would withstand all weather, with no more flooding.gravel at around 1.2m. Once the drainage installation was complete, we imported new soil to improve the overall soil quality and top up.

We installed a natural stone patio, with a sleeper frame as directed by the homeowner, and we installed sleeper beds in their desired location. The garden was re-graded and new premium turf was laid.