Public sewer under house- Wwyd?

[miggles33]

We are about to buy a house and the water and drainage search results have come back to say there is a public sewer running underneath the house. It goes from the back gardens, underneath the house to the street at the front. Would this concern you? There is an old Victorian tiled floor in the kitchen and no cement floor. Somehow this concerns me as if there was a leak there is only tiles down and then earth. The house is dated from 1900.

What does the search report say about responsibility for the sewer? If it's the water company then if anything did go wrong they would have to fix it pronto and make good.

they will not like having a house built over their sewer. How will they get the JCB in to dig it up?

I have a feeling this must be a later extension built onto an older house.

This arrangement is very common with Victorian houses in London. We live in a continuous terrace of 43 houses with no rear access. The (shared) sewers run at the back of the houses under the back gardens, and every third to fifth house it runs under that house and joins the main sewer at the front of the house under the road. Thames Water have responsibility for these shared sewers and when there is any issue they just dig up the road and resolve the problem from there. We have lived here more than 25 years and it has never been a problem for us.