Water management in East Midlands

Limestone, sandstone and a lot of clay

The East Midlands has some of the most varied ground in the country. Derbyshire runs from the fissured limestone of the White Peak and the gritstone of the Dark Peak down to the coalfield around Chesterfield. Nottingham sits on Sherwood Sandstone, which drains freely. Leicestershire is mostly Mercia Mudstone, Lias clay and glacial till, which don't. Northamptonshire mixes ironstone and limestone with clay valleys, and Lincolnshire adds the chalk of the Wolds, the limestone ridge through Lincoln and fen ground in the south-east.

The Trent is the backbone, fed by the Derwent, the Dove and the Soar, with the Nene, the Welland and the Witham draining the south and east. The river valleys carry sand and gravel terraces where groundwater can sit close to the surface.

So the answer to the drainage question changes from site to site. Infiltration can work on sandstone, gravel and some of the limestone. On the clays, and where groundwater is high, the engineer usually moves to sealed storage with a controlled outfall.

The work across the region

The M1 and A1 corridors carry large warehouses and distribution sites, with big roofs that need big tanks under the yards. Housing is spreading out from Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Northampton and the market towns, much of it onto former farmland that used to soak up the rain. The old coalfields of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire bring brownfield plots where gas membranes go in alongside the drainage.

Away from the towns it's farm work: irrigation reservoirs on the arable land of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, wildlife and mitigation ponds on development sites, and lined lagoons for slurry and digestate.

A short run from our Tamworth base

Our Tamworth base is a few miles from the Leicestershire border and close to Derbyshire, so most of the region is a regular day's work for us. Lincolnshire and the north of Nottinghamshire take a little longer to reach, and we plan the visit so the crew arrives the day the excavation is ready.

We supply and install, or install materials you've bought. We don't dig, design or carry out percolation tests. We check the formation, build the system to the drawing, weld every membrane seam and record a test weld before the groundworker backfills.

Recent East Midlands jobs

At Corby we built a 673m³ attenuation tank for the new Lidl store, 33.6m by 12m and 1.67m deep, with every seam heat-welded and the welds pressure-tested on site. At Chesterfield every weld on an attenuation tank was numbered, pressure-tested and logged before backfill. That record is what building control and a warranty provider want to see, and every tank we hand over comes with one.