Plumbers in Clay Cross, Derbyshire

Fitting modern heating into Clay Cross's company-built terraces

Clay Cross was little more than a hamlet at a crossroads until 1837, when George Stephenson's railway tunnel through Clay Cross Hill turned up coal and ironstone. The company that followed built the town around its works: some 400 houses went up for the navvies and then the miners, along with schools, shops and chapels. It is one of the clearest surviving examples of a company-built community anywhere in this part of Derbyshire.

The practical consequence is a town with a great many tightly packed nineteenth-century terraces — narrow frontages, shared boundary walls, small rear yards and, typically, solid walls rather than cavities. That is exactly the situation where a modern condensing boiler gets complicated. A flue has to terminate a safe distance from openings and boundaries, and on a narrow terrace the options are genuinely limited. The condensate has to run somewhere it will not freeze or discharge across a neighbour's yard. Neither problem is insurmountable, but both need working out before an installation date is booked, not on the day.

Alongside the old terraces there are later council-built estates and newer housing at Danesmoor, Holmgate and towards Tupton, which bring their own more conventional work. We cover all of it — repairs, replacements, radiator and system work — and every gas job is done by a Gas Safe registered engineer who will tell you plainly what will and will not work in your property.