Drainage services
in Andover

Almost everything in and around Andover sits on chalk, and that shapes how your drains behave. Test Valley's water cycle study puts Andover and Ludgershall over the River Test Chalk groundwater body, with the River Anton, a chalk stream, running through town to the Test. Chalk drains freely, so most gardens soak rain away well. But it stores water like a sponge. After a long wet winter the water table rises slowly and stays high for weeks, and in the valley villages that water gets into old sewers through every open joint and leaky manhole.

Under the old centre, drains date from the town's first sewers, laid between 1899 and 1902. Most of Andover is much newer. It took London overspill from the 1950s, with the first council houses ready by 1954, and by 1981 the population had passed 51,000. Since 2000 Saxon Fields, Augusta Park, Picket Twenty and Peake Way have pushed the edges out again. So you get century-old clay in the centre, post-war estate pipework in the middle ring and plastic on the newest estates. Each fails differently, and a survey tells you which you have.

Southern Water runs both the water supply and the sewers. Andover's sewage is pumped about 3km by rising main to Fullerton treatment works, south of the town, which also serves villages such as Goodworth Clatford, Thruxton, Monxton, Appleshaw and Penton Mewsey. In January 2024 the town council noted Southern Water tankers queuing on the industrial estates in winter, waiting to dispose of diluted sewage pumped from village networks. That is groundwater in the public system, not your drain, but it explains why toilets slow down between December and March.

Since 1 October 2011 Southern Water has owned sewers that serve more than one property and lateral drains outside your boundary, so a blockage in a run shared by a terrace is usually theirs to clear. Soakaways did not transfer. On chalk many houses have one, and it stays yours. Andover's town centre has been a conservation area since 1969, reviewed in 2021, which matters if a repair means digging up an old yard or path. Lining from inside usually avoids the question altogether.