Areas We Cover

Coventry sits at the centre of a service area that spans three counties — the West Midlands, Warwickshire, and the western edge of Leicestershire. That mix matters for drainage: much of Coventry and Solihull sits on the heavy, slow-draining Mercia Mudstone still widely known as Keuper Marl, the Warwickshire towns of Kenilworth, Bedworth, Nuneaton, Rugby, Leamington Spa, and Warwick sit across a patchwork of clay and former Warwickshire coalfield ground with their own local drainage quirks, and Hinckley, just over the county line in Leicestershire, adds the older industrial-era drainage of a historic hosiery town.

Across the whole area, the public sewer network is operated by Severn Trent Water — and since the private sewer transfer of 1 October 2011, so are most shared drains serving more than one property and the lateral drains that carry your waste on from your boundary to that public sewer. What is still yours to maintain is the drainage inside your boundary that serves only your own property: the pipework from your toilets, sinks, and gutters up to the point where it meets a shared drain or the public sewer. That is the line that decides whether a drainage problem is yours to sort out or one to report to Severn Trent, and it is worth establishing before any work is arranged.

Housing stock varies widely from town to town: Victorian terraces around Coventry's Earlsdon and Rugby's town centre, inter-war semis across much of Bedworth and Nuneaton, post-war estates such as Tile Hill and parts of Solihull, and the Georgian and Regency properties around Warwick and Leamington Spa each tend to carry their own drainage materials and failure patterns, from ageing clay joints to pitch fibre pipe laid in the 1950s to 1970s that is now well past its intended lifespan.

Whichever of these towns you're in, the practical advice is broadly the same: know where your boundary responsibility ends, keep gutters and surface drains clear ahead of heavy rain, and treat a CCTV survey as the most reliable way to tell a simple blockage from a structural pipe problem before it becomes a bigger job. Browse the area pages below for the drainage profile, local landmarks, and frequently asked questions specific to your town, or head straight to the service that matches the problem you're dealing with.

For a fuller explanation of where that boundary sits, read our guide to who is responsible for drains at your Coventry home, or book a CCTV drain survey to map the route of your drainage and settle the question for your property.