How to improve drainage in lawn/garden?

[Yorky]

Our garden is North facing, and an adequate size (although it feels small by the time we've filled it with trampoline, swings, washing line and rabbit hutch!) most of it is grassed (which we like as play area for 3xunder 6s) with some paving, but we've discovered in the recent weather that the drainage is crap and it can take longer for the lawn to be play on able again than it originally took to get bogged - is there anything we can do to help improve the drainage?

We are also looking at lowering a small raised area to level the garden and moving the patio to a part of the garden which isn't constantly in the shade of the house

I think a simple remedy is to fork your lawn to create draainage holes.

You can increase drainage by scarifying the lawn then sprinkling with sand or very fine grit.

is it a clay soil?

tell us about the slope.

We had a banked garden on clay and used to get a proper stream at the break-point on the slope. DH dug a series of rubble-filled trenches leading to a soakaway at the worst point, which worked brilliantly.

We had a waterlogged lawn on clay soil. it resembled a small pond after heavy rain. it was cured by digging a pit and trenches filled large sized gravel, topsoil on top and then grass. this has cured the problem.

There isn't much of a slope, perhaps a foot drop between the end of the drive and the house, and yes I've assumed the soil is clay-y but not sure how you tell.
7to25 - thats kind of what I expected we'd have to do which is why I put the comment about changing the layout/location of patio etc. Was just hoping there was a less labour intensive way to do it

Would it be odd to have the patio at the end of the garden, closest to the road (cul de sac) where the sun is instead of permanently in the shade of the house?

water will tend to run from the high end to the low. You don't say if the house is at the high end. Water running towards the house may cause damp walls or subfloor.

If the lawn is on clay, tining it will not make much difference, but if there is absorbent soil underneath the compacted turf, tining will help the surface to drain. You can try to brush coarse sand or grit into the holes but it is quite difficult. If it is just the top layer that is compacted then you can loosen it and work in gritty top-dressings.

If you have flowerbeds or something round the lawn, you can make a drainage channel round the edges to help excess water run away and go downhill.

7to25's french drains and soakaways will do the trick if you are willing to do the work.

I've got heavy clay and waterlogged lawn. Its much better now because we've laid plastic drainage pipe within gravel filled trenches, carefully laid so that its running down hill to the (also excavated, by hand, by me) bog garden in the middle of the garden which then drains in a single point to next door (did that before we moved in, we've just improved the process a bit).

Soakaways only work if there's somewhere for the water to soak to - you need the normal sort of clay where there are gravel layers here and there - then if your soakaway goes down at least as far as one of these, the water will soak down to that layer much more quickly in your free draining soakaway and then trickle out in the gravel layer. However, if you have soil like we have (tested with auger to 15m) if you dig a soakaway it will simply fill up with water to the watertable level (which, after a wet winter is at lawn level) and take agest to drain and you've simply put a lot of work into something that isn't going to work efficiently for very long.