Culverts and underground streams and springs in SE23

It’s June and yet the water table is high enough that my garden is under water this morning. When we bought this house, the previous owner told me there is a culverted stream under the garden which is why it always floods in one particular sport in heavy rain. I have no idea if this is true or not, but I’ve always wondered about the streams and springs we know are under our feet here in SE23.

Does anyone know if there is any historical record of the underground streams and springs? Thames Water SHOULD know, but I’m not sure they do.

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We have one in a buried pipe down our sloping garden in Boveney Rd, which discharges noisily into our kitchen drain for many days after heavy rain. Still it’s nice to live by running water!

Interesting. Is that a storm drain or connected to a natural water course?

We’ve been told it’s a spring, I think by the previous owners of our house, but on what authority I don’t know. It runs continuously and gently but can go on noisily for days after a downpour, suggesting a more indirect source than surface water, so maybe it is a spring.

It could be a ground water drain rather than a natural spring, we’ve got one of each in our garden which both feed down to a well at the bottom. As pleasant as it all sounds, it also means our garden is a boggy mess for 6 months of the year - when it’s not under 3 feet of water from a flash flood that is

We’ve been working with Thames Water to try to find the exact source of the spring but their local records for such things are pretty much non existent.

Hmm, whatever it is we’ve also been getting water running across our patio for a few months, and this appears to be percolating out from the slope adjacent to it. Strange, as we’ve been here 10 years and it was fine for the first 8 or 9; I think there may be drainage issues further up the hill. We can’t quite face the excavation necessary to track the source and/or put in a soakaway (if that would even work) and anyway it’s hard to find an expert who is not interested in selling a pre-conceived solution. The one indie drainage consultant I did find said we were too small for him to bother with. Happily the patio slopes towards the drain in one corner, so we’re hoping new gullies all round it will just take the water away.

If it’s only started in the last year or so, then it may be worth contacting Thames Water anyway - they were quite good with us, did a load of testing on the chemical composition of the water to verfiy that it wasn’t from a split in one of their pipes, either incoming or outgoing. In our case it all came back negative, so short of bottling it and selling up Shoreditch way as a high end local spring water, we ended up doing pretty much what you said, dug a gully along the points it seemed to be coming in and routed it into the existing ground water drain we have.

Good luck with it all, as much as water is vital for life and all that, sometimes it can be a right destructive little so & so!

Thanks for that advice, we’ll speak with Thames Water in case it’s their pigeon! We don’t know who ‘owns’ the pipe running down our garden, maybe they do…