Five eleven-storey slab blocks of maisonettes stand along Highcliffe Drive above Downshire Field, listed Grade II* and drawn up after the London County Council’s architects saw Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. London Carpet Cleaning has cleaned flats and maisonettes across Roehampton, SW15, since 2009. Prices start at £36 a room, and carpets are dry within 6 to 7 hours.
An estate laid out for views of Richmond Park
In the late 1940s the LCC bought Roehampton Park and three Georgian country estates on the edge of Richmond Park. Design work began in 1951 on one rule: leave as much parkland open as possible and give as many tenants as possible a view over the park. Alton East went up first, from 1951 to 1955, and Alton West followed from 1955 to 1959. The slabs sit in what were the grounds of Downshire House, and the Georgian mansions were kept; Mount Clare and Parkstead House are listed Grade I.
The council made the Alton Estate a conservation area on 15 March 2001. It covers 58.1 hectares and holds more listed buildings than any other conservation area in Wandsworth, and in June 2020 the estate’s landscape was added to the national register of parks and gardens. The housing comes in five kinds: 27 point blocks, the five slabs, long terraces of four-storey maisonettes, two-storey terraced houses, and small groups of bungalows built for pensioners. The shopping parade on Danebury Avenue opened in 1959 and 1960, and Robert Clatworthy’s bronze bull, listed Grade II*, stands at the corner of Danebury Avenue and Tangley Grove.
The heating has changed. The high blocks were built with a district heating system, with a tall chimney at the end of Winchfield House, one of the slabs; that communal system has been abandoned and every home now has its own. Older Roehampton survives around it, with Georgian villas along Roehampton Lane and Medfield Street and the University of Roehampton in eighteenth and nineteenth-century houses. Roehampton Lane is the A306, and there is no tube station here, so the buses do most of the work.
Roehampton North West by the numbers
| Homes that are | Share |
|---|---|
| Flats in purpose-built blocks | 84.6% |
| Rented from the council | 50.5% |
| Owned outright or with a mortgage | 21.3% |
| Built 1945 to 1972 | 60.2% |
| Built 1973 to 1999 | 27.8% |
| Three-bedroom homes | 23.7% |
This census area is the estate. Purpose-built flats and maisonettes make up 84.6% of homes, and three in five (60.2%) date from 1945 to 1972, the Alton years. Another 27.8% were built between 1973 and 1999. Half of all households (50.5%) rent from the council, and only about one in five owns their home. That mix decides the work: plenty of moves in and out, alongside long-standing households who have been in the same maisonette for years.
The estate was built with a lot of maisonettes, homes on two floors with a staircase inside, and nearly a quarter of homes here (23.7%) have three bedrooms. Those inside stairs are where the carpet goes grey first. A three-bedroom maisonette, with its living room and the inside flight, comes to £192. Heating matters too: 2.7% of homes have no central heating, so in a cold flat we leave a window open a crack and allow a little longer before the furniture goes back.
Figures: ONS Census 2021 (Wandsworth 013) and VOA council tax stock, March 2024.
Parking and lifts on the Alton estate
Most of the estate’s own roads, Danebury Avenue and Highcliffe Drive among them, do not appear in the council’s controlled-zone street list. The council says housing estate roads may run their own parking scheme, and ordinary CPZ permits are not valid on them, so we look at the signs at your block and use a visitor bay or the estate’s loading space. Danebury Avenue is limited to pedestrians and some traffic in the middle, so for some blocks we park on the nearest open road and wheel the machine in on a trolley.
The public roads are easy. Roehampton Lane, Medfield Street and Dover House Road are in zone R2, which runs for one hour only, 11am to midday, Monday to Friday; R1 runs 10am to 11am. Outside that hour the kerb is free. In the point blocks we use the lift. In the slabs and maisonette ranges, tell us the floor and whether your front door is off an open deck, because the van can sit further away than you think on these sloping, landscaped sites. Move small items off the floor and out from under the beds before we arrive.
Grey stairs, settees and family wear
The jobs here follow family life. Hallways and inside staircases that have gone grey from years of use are the most common booking, especially in the maisonettes where one run of carpet takes the whole household’s traffic. We get a lot of upholstery work too: a settee after a stomach bug, a wool rug with a coffee ring, a child’s mattress after a wet night. Hot-water extraction lifts soiling and smells, and most stains with them. A stain that has been down for a year or more, or has already bleached the fibre, often comes back much improved but still visible, and we say so on the doorstep before we start.
How much does carpet cleaning cost in Roehampton?
Every Roehampton job is priced at the same fixed rates as the rest of Wandsworth, and we charge nothing for the trip.
- Carpet, per bedroom, from £36
- Living room from £43
- Through-lounge from £61
- Stairs, one flight, from £41
- Two-seater sofa from £57; armchair from £33
- Rug up to 3m² from £35; mattress from £35
Get a free quote, or call us on 020 8077 8090.
The cleaning we do on the estate and in the village
Our main work here is hot-water extraction carpet cleaning, which rinses the dirt out and leaves the pile dry within 6 to 7 hours. We clean sofas and mattresses through our upholstery service, and we clean wool and patterned rugs in the home with our rug cleaning. For the rest of the borough, from Putney across to Battersea, see our Wandsworth carpet cleaning page; we also cover neighbouring Kingston Vale, along the A3 by Richmond Park.
Answers for Roehampton households
Which Roehampton streets do you cover, from the Alton estate to Dover House?
All of SW15 Roehampton: Alton West and Alton East, including Danebury Avenue, Highcliffe Drive, Tangley Grove and Minstead Gardens, the Dover House cottage estate, Roehampton Lane and the old village, plus Putney Park Lane and the roads by the university. Putney Heath and the edge of Richmond Park are on the same round.
Where will the van park on the estates?
The R2 zone on the public roads runs for one hour, 11am to midday, Monday to Friday, so most of the time street parking is easy. Estate roads can have their own parking rules, so tell us your block and we will find a bay or pull in close to the entrance with the kit.
Do you do end-of-tenancy cleans for landlords here?
Yes, and it is a big share of our Roehampton work, with the university and the estates bringing plenty of moves. We clean to the standard agents and landlords expect at check-out and give you a dated receipt. Book the carpets for after the furniture has gone, so every inch of the floor gets done.
How long before I can walk on the carpet?
Allow 6 to 7 hours, and a morning clean is fine for normal use by the evening. A window cracked open and the heating on low help it along. A dense lounge carpet holds a little more water, so if a new tenant is moving in tight behind you, tell us and we will do the wettest rooms first.
Do you clean the staircase inside a maisonette?
Yes, and in the Alton maisonettes it is usually the dirtiest carpet in the home, because every trip between the living floor and the bedrooms goes over it. We clean it tread by tread with a hand tool, edges and risers included, and charge it as one flight from £41. It needs the same 6 to 7 hours to dry as any carpet, so ask the family to keep to socks and no shoes on it until then.
My flat is in one of the listed blocks. Does that limit what you can do?
No. Listing controls alterations to the building, and cleaning a fitted carpet alters nothing. We clean your carpets exactly as we would in any other flat. The only practical point is access: tell us the block and floor, and whether the lift needs booking for a heavy machine.
Every clean is backed by our re-clean guarantee: if a spot comes back, so do we, at no charge. We are fully insured, our cleaners are DBS-checked, and we have worked in Roehampton since 2009.
