Professional cleaning in Kensington and Chelsea

There is no uncontrolled street anywhere in the borough. The council sells no visitor vouchers, and it has no business permits either, so a resident has nothing to hand the cleaner for the day. During controlled hours the cleaner’s car needs a PayByPhone bay or a public car park. Once control ends for the day, a car may stand in a resident bay, a PayByPhone bay or on a single yellow line at no charge. The hourly PayByPhone tariff depends on the zone, and a diesel car pays more than a petrol one. Whatever the cleaner actually pays is passed on at cost and capped at £40.

Carpet and upholstery jobs bring portable machines, which are heavy. Single yellow lines allow up to 40 minutes of continuous loading without any dispensation, long enough to get the kit to your door and then move the car into a bay. A dispensation needs 48 hours’ notice and is not granted to cars, people carriers, four-wheel drives or minibuses. Suspending a bay outside the house is possible, though the council charges for it per space per day, which is rarely worth it for one clean.

Kensington Square goes back to 1685, when Thomas Young started building large houses there, each with a court in front and a garden behind; the council adopted an appraisal of the square’s conservation area in November 2017. Behind the High Street, the Phillimore estate is Victorian. A Pimlico builder, Joseph Gordon Davis, took on 21 acres in 1855, and between 1856 and 1868 leases were granted on Argyll Road, Essex Villas, Stafford Terrace, Phillimore Gardens and the streets around them.

A family in an undivided house there may have a stair carpet running through every floor, and the stairs usually wear before the rooms do. With carpet cleaning, a flight of stairs costs £41 and a landing £9; a portable hot water extraction machine is carried up one flight at a time. Turn the heating up or prop a window open and the pile usually dries in a few hours. Not every household here owns, though. In Abingdon and Campden wards 48.7 per cent rented privately in 2021, against 42.0 per cent who owned. Professional cleaners driving in can fall back on the public car park beneath Kensington Town Hall on Hornton Street, W8 7NX, which stays open day and night.

Of the seven areas on this page, South Kensington has the most private renting: 55.3 per cent of households in Brompton & Hans Town and Queen’s Gate wards rented privately in 2021. Queen’s Gate, which began life as Albert’s Road, was built under an 1855 agreement on land the Royal Commissioners for the Great Exhibition had bought; it starts at Kensington Gardens and ends at Old Brompton Road. Hans Town is older. Henry Holland laid it out on the Cadogan estate from 1777, mainly as terraces of two or three storeys plus a basement and an attic, and when the first leases expired, between about 1870 and 1890, much of it was replaced in red brick. Those Queen Anne Revival houses and mansion blocks, on Cadogan Square, Lennox Gardens and Pont Street, are why people call the style Pont Street Dutch.

A Hans Town house with its basement and attic spreads the cleaning over four or five levels. A flat let furnished passes the same sofa from one tenant to the next: sofa cleaning is £57 for a two-seater, £26 for each further seat and £33 for an armchair. Before booking professional cleaning for a licensed let, check the council, since SW7 crosses into two Westminster wards, Lancaster Gate and Knightsbridge & Belgravia, and Westminster runs selective licensing.

Holland Park is mostly large Victorian houses on tree-lined streets. William and Francis Radford, master builders, held contracts for more than 200 of them, and much of the area went up in the two decades from 1860. Detached houses hold 2.4 per cent of Holland ward’s households, more than twice the 1.1 per cent across Kensington and Chelsea, while 28.0 per cent live in flats carved out of houses.

A whole house of that size is cleaned by the hour. House cleaning covers every floor of the house, stairs included, and the hours depend on the size of the house and how often the cleaner comes. Note one local exception to the Sunday rule. Everywhere else in Kensington and Chelsea, PayByPhone bays cost nothing on a Sunday; most of Holland ward still charges, and so does the car park in Holland Park, so a Sunday clean here can still carry a parking cost. As on any day, the parking added to the bill for professional cleaning is the amount the cleaner paid, up to £40.

Social renting dominates in North Kensington: 62.0 per cent of households in Notting Dale, St. Helen’s, Dalgarno and Golborne wards rent from a social landlord. Trellick Tower on Golborne Road, opened in 1972 and listed Grade II*, has 217 homes over 31 floors. Its lifts are in a separate service tower that reaches the corridors at every third floor only, and the flats above and below those floors have their own internal stairs.

A carpet or upholstery machine therefore goes up in the lift and, for many flats, along a corridor and up or down an inner stair, so give the floor number when you book. The older streets are lower. Acklam Road and Golborne Road bound a grid laid out in 1864 and 1865, where close to 400 building leases followed in 1868 and 1869, almost every one for a narrow terraced house of three storeys. Peabody is rebuilding Wornington Green as Portobello Square, with more than 1,000 homes planned and close to 600 of them affordable. A family moving into a flat the previous occupants left grubby can book deep cleaning from £186, which pays for two professional cleaners working three hours, machines and products included.