Anyone know anything about soakaways?

[MintfordGreen]

Basically we are about to buy a house and we’ve found this in the middle of the garden. Hubby reckons a soak away with concrete rings? Not sure of exact name. My husband wants to build a small garden office asap after moving in. The garden isn’t huge so it would be near impossible to give this drain 5m clearance all round which from reading online some say is legally required. If we can’t build the office we probably won’t get the house so it’s a big deal. We have zero experience with this sort of thing. Anyone out there got any advice? Garden office would fit great with around 2m clearance of the drain but no more.

Are you sure it is a soakaway? Most soakaway I have installed or seem gave been filled with stones.
Ask your local authority drains department if they have a sewer crossing the garden

We have soakaways but they don’t look anything like this. Could it be a borehole/well?

That’s not a soak away. Have you got the title plans? Which country?

Cess pit inspection hatch?

Yes agree with others not a soakaway. Is it something that water company needs to access? What have the current owners told you?

Ah okay. It’s for a house in Suffolk. It’s on a relatively new estate built 2010. Attached two images from the search reports if any use. It wasn’t picked up by our level 2 survey, we stumbled across it whilst checking something separate. We aren’t really sure what we need to ask. Is it common to have these in your back garden? Thanks so much for all the help

I just know that we have one in our garden because I was there when it was being dug in, it’s about 6ft deep and wide and is filled with hardcore/rocks.
What you’re looking at there looks nothing like our soakaway.

Well it says it's the public water mains doesn't it?

Could it be access to an old air raid shelter?

It doesn't look like any soakaway that I've come across, either.

It looks more like a drainage shaft or possibly a storm water drain. What was there before the new housing estate? (We have a lot of interesting things under manholes in our gardens around here due to septic tanks, bore holes, LPG, plus random pipes leading to farm buildings that have since been knocked down, etc.)

I just had a new soakaway put in and it looks nothing like that.

It’s not a soakaway (I know them,I used to design them!). It looks like access to a deep culvert or cesspit or maybe storm water storage. I’d want to know where it goes, and the extent of that structure.

I’d be getting on to Anglian Water. It’s usual to have this type of asset in a private garden. Who owns it? Who has maintenance responsibility? Is it active or redundant? Does the householder have to provide access, likely how often? Does the householder have to keep it clear? What’s the easement? Where does it lead? Is there a culvert under the house?

Soakaway ard only about 4-5 inches across and have a grating instead of a solid lid.

Maybe a sewer or drain. I have one running across my back garden. A previous occupant built a shed that obscures about 10cm of the inspection hatch. I've lived here 24 years and it's only needed to be accessed once, when "flushable wipes" (not ours) turned out not to be fully flushable through old Victorian drains. The inspector grumbled a bit but managed to lift the hatch to view, and fortunately recognised that it wasn't me who built the stupid shed.

@IbizaToTheNorfolkBroads thanks very much for this. I’m going to call Anglian Water today. Do you have anything idea what the building regs are around this? We wanted to build a garden office within that area, do you know if there’s a general radius you need to leave around these things?

It’s access to the drains. Nothing out of the ordinary. Assume the garden office wouldn’t need foundations, just a concrete surface to build on which could be right next the grid as long as access isn’t impeded.

Im surprised you’ve never come across a drain cover before!

@titchy thanks for the nasty, unhelpful little comment, I hope that’s made you feel better
👍🏻 Go and find something better to do with your life.

Wtf 😅

We had an issue building a conservatory over a 'drain'. The company said to apply for a build over agreement, but that was wrong.
Long story short, we had one of the utilities come out with a camera and it was a sewer. Not just ours, but the pipe collected every house along the street and ours was the last house in the row, so the pipe had 10 houses worth of sewer going through it.

If the sewer was JUST from our house, then a buildover agreement would have been an option, plus leaving an access hatch inside the conservatory. As it was a public sewer, we had to pay to have the massive pipe re-directed around the conservatory by X meters. This cost ££££ but we were already part way through when this was realised. I would not do it again due to the money, stress, uncertainly and having the entire garden dug down to 2m!

If yours is water and not sewerage, hopefully its easier. Apparently either sewers or water ways were privatised a few years ago, but had very poor records beforehand, so most companies have no idea where their pipes are now.

Did you go into the garden and take the cover off and look down or is that a stock photo?

@5289843DM thank you, this is what we are worried about. It’s in a really awkward place so if we wanted to do anything in the garden or back of the house it would be in the way, just trying to work out exactly how much of an issue.

We called anglia water and they said no record and to call council who said they couldn’t find anything but could be an old bunker. I don’t think it is. We’ve passed it onto the solicitors but it means weeks of waiting now.

@Shedmistress no that the actual thing not stock.

Ok so you went into the garden, took the cover off and took a photo?

Did you ask the person who had let you into the garden what it was?

I'm an ex Anglian water sewerage engineer. It's not a soakaway.

If Anglian Water also have no record of it then it's neither a main sewer or a water main. It is far to big to be anything to do with a small sewer supply (ie a small pipe connecting your house to the main sewer)

It's possibly access to an old defunct cess pit. I know you said the house is quite new but were there houses there before? Or something unrelated to the water company.

So if not a mains sewer or a water main I would happily build a garden office within 2m of it. If I was desperate I'd probably build over it but I can be a bit gung ho about stuff!

I would not be going down those rungs or even taking the lid off it and peering down it without a gas monitor! I have known people overwhelmed by doing that and fallen head first into a sewer and drowned. Any enclosed underground space which is not well vented has the potential for gas build up, not just sewers

Can you see the bottom of it btw.....does it open up to a larger chamber?

I'm wondering if there is some sort of surface water system which potentially the housing developer may have put in when building the estate? Can you find anything online regarding when planning permission for the estate was given? Sometimes a developer has to consider surface water flooding and put a balancing /storage system in.....if so that might be in the development planning permission documents.