DIGGING A HOLE

They're Digging a Hole

I returned from Provence and found that the contractors were beginning to dig the trench for the new drainage along the south side of the church. This is very good news, because the church has suffered so much damage from water ingress over the years, and this should improve that immeasurably. I yield to no-one in my admiration of G.E.Street, a great British architect (not merely a great Victorian architect) but I'm afraid he had a weakness when it came to rainwater disposal; he clearly didn't have anyone doing the calculations as to the volume of water he was dealing with, and he tried to be too clever by half. There are frankly too few downpipes for the vast expanse of roof we have, but of course medieval gothic buildings tended to have spouts to take water off  high roofs (often disguised as gargoyles) which was a solution that was not acceptable a hundred and fifty years ago, let alone today. Downpipes are not very aesthetic, so I guess he used as few as he could get away with. He also tried to dispose of all our rainwater on the south side, because it's downhill from the north side, which is logical, but complicates matters enormously.

On the north side of the church the downpipes did not issue into drains in the pavement, as you might expect, but went straight down into the ground. They then came through the walls of the undercroft, running down the inside wall, for the water to be collected in one drain, which ran under the floor of the undercroft and out to the mains drain in the road on the south side. As you can imagine, this gave immense scope for blockages that were impossible to clear, not to mention invasion by tree-roots as it turned out. It also appeared that the drain had collapsed on the south side, so whatever water was actually getting through (not much, probably) was just being deposited into the south wall of the church. So five years ago we dug a new land drain along the north wall, in a gravel-filled trench, and sent the rainwater into that, connecting with the mains on the south side by going round the east end of the church, thanks to the natural slope in the ground. That worked very well, except that we recently discovered that the contractors had filled the old underground pipes with cement, but not very effectively, and so those pipes were neatly conducting ground water into the undercroft brickwork (the superior option of removing the pipes was never really feasible, since they go at least three metres down vertically, and then at an angle into the wall). So we had to sort that out from the inside, removing as much pipe as possible, putting waterproof material in, and then replacing brickwork. It has to be said that this brickwork (by Cliveden Conservation) is so good you'd never know it was new. So the north side has been sorted out.

On the south side, however, we had commissioned a series of drain surveys over the years, which had never produced much enlightenment. Here's a hint: drain surveys aren't worth the DVD they come on. Now we have found quite conclusively that the connections to the mains drainage on the south side have been blocked with cement at some time. Why? As our downpipes on the south side also go underground, theoretically to connect with the mains via quite short underground pipes, this means that all our rainwater from the south side has simply been deposited in the earth immediately adjacent to the south wall. It is no surprise that the south wall of the undercroft (the Comper Chapel) has always been very wet. So now we're remedying that, with a new drain run down the road, that can run into an existing connection that isn't blocked up. It also gives somewhere for the drainage from various new basins that we are introducing into the building to go (though some, like my new sacristy, will need pumps).

So, it's good news that they are digging. I was less pleased to see Cadent vans outside my house yesterday, because Cadent are the gas board. It turns out that while digging their drain trench our contractors cut through the gas supply to my house. So yesterday my gas was cut off. Today, Cadent are working to restore my supply (with the customary bright yellow plastic piping, instead of old metal pipes). At best, this involves them excavating the concrete floor of my garage, at worst, a trench across the road and across my (concrete) yard, which will be more work than can be done today. I left the house when the pneumatic drill started. We shall see. Prayers are being offered.

Fortunately, hot water is not a big issue at the moment, and salad is quite attractive.