Westbourne Terrace and Sussex Gardens were laid out as the main avenues of a planned suburb in 1827, and their tall cream-fronted stucco houses are now mostly flats with high ceilings and long sash windows. London Carpet Cleaning has worked in Bayswater, W2, since 2009, at fixed prices from £36 a room. Carpets are dry within 6 to 7 hours.
Stucco avenues planned in 1827
Bayswater began as a fashionable suburb. In 1827 the surveyor to the Bishop of London laid out the ground between Praed Street, Edgware Road and Bayswater Road as a pattern of wide streets, crescents and squares, with Westbourne Terrace and Sussex Gardens as the two main avenues. Westminster made the district a conservation area in 1967. The stock is mid-Victorian white stucco: the tall houses of Westbourne Terrace, Gloucester Terrace and Lancaster Gate, and the garden squares at Cleveland Square, Leinster Square and Porchester Gardens.
Nearly all of those houses were single family homes once and were split into flats during the last century. The typical job here is a conversion flat with high ceilings, a couple of bedrooms and tall sash windows, up the original stair or in a lift added later. Behind the terraces run narrow cobbled mews, and to the north, by Bishop’s Bridge Road, the Hallfield Estate.
Queensway, the Whiteley and three stations
Queensway is the shopping street on the western side, and Westminster gave it a conservation area of its own in 2002; it follows the line of an old lane that once ran to Westbourne Green. Its landmark is the Whiteley, the old department store, rebuilt to hold 139 homes (14 of them serviced apartments) with a 109-room hotel. A cleaner heading for a flat off Moscow Road passes the domed Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral, consecrated in 1882.
Three stations sit on the doorstep. Bayswater, opened by the Metropolitan Railway on 1 October 1868, is on the Circle and District lines; Queensway on the Central line is a short walk south; and Lancaster Gate is further along Bayswater Road, with Paddington a walk to the north. Kensington Gardens runs along the southern edge.
A rented district, by the census
| Homes that are | Share |
|---|---|
| Rented privately | 60.8% |
| Rented from the council or a housing association | 9.2% |
| One-bedroom homes | 43.2% |
| Three-bedroom homes | 14.7% |
| Heated by electricity only | 21.5% |
| Built before 1919 | 73.2% |
| Built 1945 to 1972 | 9.3% |
The ONS splits Bayswater into several neighbourhoods. Our point for this page, between Queensway and Lancaster Gate, falls in Bayswater East (Westminster 016); the streets along Queensway itself are counted next door, in an area named after Queensway, and the houses there are the same stucco stock.
Renting is the story. Six households in ten rent from a private landlord (60.8%), and only 9.2% from the council or a housing association, so tenancies end and start all year and most of our work is timed to a check-out. One-bed flats are the largest group (43.2%). For a one-bed let off Inverness Terrace, the bedroom plus the living room comes to £79. Larger flats are not rare either: 14.7% of homes have three bedrooms.
The buildings are old. Almost three in four homes (73.2%) are in buildings from before 1919, and blocks from 1945 to 1972 account for 9.3%. Just over a fifth of homes heat with electricity only (21.5%), and in a cold flat that can slow the last stage of drying, so we leave the windows open a little where we can.
Figures: ONS Census 2021 (Westminster 016) and VOA council tax stock, March 2024.
End-of-tenancy is the bread and butter
A large share of these flats are let furnished, sub-let or run as short stays, so most bookings are end-of-tenancy carpets: musty bedrooms shut up between tenants, a coffee or wine ring by the window, traffic lanes worn into a hallway runner. We meet a lot of wool, both fitted in the older conversions and loose rugs in the lounge. Wool takes colour and warm water well, which is why a curry or takeaway stain that looks permanent usually lifts. Fabric sofas in these flats see hard use and clean up nicely.
Worn stairs are the exception. In long-let conversions where a wool stair carpet has had years of grit ground into the pile, a clean brightens it and resets the texture, but it cannot put back fibre that foot traffic has crushed flat. If a runner is past saving, we say so on the day and do not charge you for a clean that will not help.
Permits, sub-zones and the van
Bayswater is Westminster’s parking zone B, and the hours change from one sub-zone to the next. Around Queensway, Leinster Square, Porchester Gardens and Inverness Terrace (sub-zone B3), paid bays and single yellow lines are controlled from 8.30am to 6.30pm on weekdays and until 1.30pm on Saturday, and resident bays are permit-only from 8.30am to 10pm every day. Up by Westbourne Terrace and Paddington (sub-zone B5), the paid bays run all day Saturday too.
We unload at your door before 11am, when Westminster allows loading on a yellow line for as long as needed, then move to a paid bay and run the hose in. The mews are narrow and cobbled and hard to turn in, so for a mews house we stop at the end and walk the kit down. In a converted house with no lift, we carry the machine up and protect the stair on the way.
How much does carpet cleaning cost in Bayswater?
All prices are fixed before we come, there is no call-out fee, and Westminster pays what every other London borough pays.
- Carpet, per bedroom: from £36
- Living room: from £43
- Through-lounge: from £61
- Stairs, one flight: from £41
- Two-seater sofa: from £57; mattress from £35
- Rug up to 3m²: from £35
A two-bedroom flat with its living room comes to £115. Get a free quote online, or call us on 020 8077 8090.
Carpets, sofas and mattresses across W2
The core service is hot-water extraction, the deep steam carpet cleaning that pulls grit and odour out of the pile and leaves it dry within 6 to 7 hours. We clean sofas, armchairs and mattresses under upholstery cleaning, handy before a family visit or after illness in the house, and delicate or stained wool pieces get rug cleaning in the home across W2, with a photo first for anything delicate. We cover the rest of Westminster too, and if your flat sits near the park, Hyde Park and Queensway are the same team and the same prices.
What Bayswater tenants and owners ask
Which parts of W2 do you cover?
All of it. We work the garden squares around Cleveland Square and Leinster Square, the terraces along Westbourne Terrace and Gloucester Terrace, the flats off Queensway and Inverness Terrace, and down towards Lancaster Gate and the park. Neighbouring Paddington, Royal Oak and Edgware Road are on the same round, so one van usually handles the area.
Is parking a problem on the squares and mews?
Most of Bayswater is Westminster’s zone B, and the mews behind the main terraces, places like Bathurst Mews and Conduit Mews, are narrow and cobbled. We carry our gear in and work off the van, so a paid bay or a short stretch of kerb nearby is all we need. Tell us the street when you book and we will plan the approach.
Can you do a flat fast for an end-of-tenancy check-out?
Yes, and it is most of what we do here. We clean the carpets, the wardrobe bases and the edges that check-out clerks look at, and we give you a dated receipt for the agent or inventory clerk. A one or two-bed flat is done in a morning, and the carpets need up to 6 to 7 hours to dry, so book it the day before the keys go back.
How long until the carpet is properly dry?
About 6 to 7 hours for the carpet to dry. Bayswater conversions help, because the high Victorian ceilings and tall sash windows move air well. Open a window after we leave and a bedroom cleaned in the morning is dry by the evening, when the furniture can go back.
Can you turn a short-let flat round between guests?
Yes. Short stays are common in the converted terraces here, and the gap between guests can be a few hours. We clean the carpets and the sofa in one visit, and with extraction the rooms are dry within 6 to 7 hours, ready for the bed to be made and the next arrival. Give us the check-out and check-in times when you book.
Can you clean a mattress on the same visit?
Yes, mattresses are from £35 and we do them alongside the carpets. It is a common add-on at the end of a tenancy or after a long let, when a mattress has picked up stains and a stale smell. A mattress takes about 24 hours to dry, so do not sleep on it the same night.
Every clean comes with our re-clean guarantee: if a treated spot is not right, we come back and put it right at no charge. We are fully insured and DBS-checked, and we have been cleaning carpets, sofas and rugs across Bayswater and the rest of London since 2009.
