Barnsbury is N1, over York Way from Camden Town and inside Islington. Its best-known streets are its early nineteenth-century garden squares: Gibson Square, built between 1836 and 1839 and lined with Regency and Victorian terraces, Lonsdale Square, where every house is listed and the terraces carry Tudor Gothic gables and Elizabethan-style windows, and Thornhill and Cloudesley Squares. Caledonian Road & Barnsbury station is on the Overground, and Barnsbury Wood, London’s smallest nature reserve, is a few minutes from Caledonian Road.
A square house, top to bottom
Where one of these houses is still a single home from the lower ground floor up, the stairs are the biggest part of the job: three flights at £41 each and a landing at every floor at £9 each, which is £150 before a single room. With three bedrooms, the first-floor drawing room and the hall, the whole house comes to £323.
If the stair carpet is a runner held down by rods, the rods stay put. The runner is cleaned where it lies, one step at a time, and the wand stays away from the paintwork at the edges.
Down the area steps
A lower ground floor flat tends to have its own door beneath the front steps, reached down the area from the pavement. The machine comes down those steps with us, so tell us if the gate at the top is kept locked. Where the flat opens onto the back garden, grit from the garden path settles in the first metre of carpet inside the door and needs extra passes before the rinse.
The Barnsbury Estate
South of Copenhagen Street, between Barnsbury Road and Caledonian Road, is the Barnsbury Estate. Its oldest part is red-brick London County Council housing begun in 1936, and the later blocks went up between the 1950s and the 1970s, some of them ten storeys high. A bedroom there costs £36, the same as on Lonsdale Square, and a two-bedroom flat with its living room and hallway comes to £137.
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| Bedroom | £36 |
| Living room | £43 |
| Through lounge | £61 |
| Stairs, per flight | £41 |
| Rug up to 3m² | £35 |
| Rug over 3m² | £51 |
| Bedroom, with a move-out clean | £29 |
| Living room, with a move-out clean | £36 |
| Stairs, with a move-out clean | £35 |
Islington’s parking hours
The bays here are Islington’s, not Camden’s. On most Barnsbury streets they are controlled on weekdays between 8.30am and 6.30pm and on Saturday mornings to 1.30pm, while Sundays are free. So a Sunday is the one day with no bay to pay for. Any other day, a paid bay for the van goes on the bill at exactly what it cost.
King’s Cross is the nearest of our other area pages, back across York Way. The method is on the carpet cleaning page, rugs are covered on the rug cleaning page, and every figure is on the price list.