Heating Engineers in Chalfont St Peter

Three winters, three different failures

Chalfont St Peter is the best documented flood village of the five Buckinghamshire towns we work in, and the records are the council's own.

The Misbourne, a chalk stream that rises near Great Missenden and joins the Colne at Denham, runs under the High Street. In the winter of 2014 the council's investigation recorded sewage-laden water entering the George pub, internal flooding in the Greyhound Inn and a High Street closed for about two weeks. It found groundwater had played a role by getting into the foul sewer network.

In September 2019 a storm of roughly thirty to forty millimetres in a couple of hours surcharged the foul sewer under the High Street and flooded five business properties to about eighteen inches. That report says plainly that there was no flooding from the river and that groundwater levels were normal. It was a sewer that could not cope.

In 2024 the council's detailed report describes several sources acting together. Groundwater got into public and private drainage pipes, the Misbourne flooded low ground upstream of the village, and river water entered the sewers through submerged manholes. The High Street was closed from January to May, peak groundwater was above the levels of 2013 and 2014, and questionnaire replies reported sewer flooding inside properties, with sinks and toilets backing up, in at least three places. Thames Water told the council it had found historical misconnections letting surface water into the foul network from private properties and highway drains. The council has since set up a flood action group, supported by its groundwater project until March 2027.

A village that grew in the 1920s and again in the 1950s

Buckinghamshire County Council's historic assessment says the railway arriving at Gerrards Cross was the catalyst that turned Chalfont St Peter into a suburban town, with much larger developments from the late 1920s and a population that rose from about 6,000 in 1931 to over 12,000 by 1961. North Park was built in 1907 and the Firs Estate between 1910 and 1930. The Peterville Estate followed in 1921.

The figures show the later wave. In the Census area covering the north of the village, 910 of 3,270 properties date from 1955 to 1964, and 62.3% of households in the wider ward live in detached houses. The south-west part is flatter across the decades, with about 38% built before 1939. Nothing in this says how your boiler is doing, but a house of that age and size is the sort where the question worth asking is what heating it has now, how its pipework has been altered, and whether a replacement should be a different type of boiler altogether. We look at the house and the hot water you use before recommending anything. The historic assessment also notes that modern buildings now dominate the village centre and very little historic architecture remains, though Shrub's Wood on Gorelands Lane, built in 1933 and 1934 by Mendelsohn and Chermayeff in reinforced concrete, is Grade II* listed.

Flues and the three conservation areas

The village has three conservation areas, all designated in 1992 by Chiltern District Council: the Firs Estate, Gold Hill East, and North Park with part of Kingsway. The High Street is not one of them. The old leaflets, which are scanned Chiltern documents, ask owners to keep chimneys, and say nothing on flues.

For a house in a conservation area, the national rule is that a flue on a wall or roof slope that fronts a highway and forms the principal or side elevation needs planning permission. Buckinghamshire Council publishes no flue wording of its own, and none of its current Article 4 directions covers the village. The parish council told Natural England in 2022 that the village was left out of the Chilterns designation in 1965 by about a mile, so on its account the stricter flue rule inside a National Landscape does not apply to the village itself. Conservation area status still does.

Who does the work

Two people do the work. Andrew Millward has forty years behind him, is a Heat Geek Elitist and is Viessmann accredited. Elis Harizi does every bathroom we fit. We work on any make of boiler, and choose Viessmann where the choice is ours.