Kensington Square, laid out from 1685 and first called King’s Square, is a minute’s walk from St Mary Abbots church, and the streets between them are among the oldest in W8. London Carpet Cleaning cleans across St Mary’s, from wool runners in the old houses to fitted carpet in the mansion flats. Rooms are cleaned from £36, and carpets are dry within 6 to 7 hours.
A parish of old squares and early electric light
The area takes its name from the parish church on the corner of Kensington High Street and Kensington Church Street. The present St Mary Abbots was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and completed in 1872, and its spire, 278 feet high, is the tallest in London. Its school, founded in 1707 as a charity school, still has painted statues of a boy and a girl from about 1715. Kensington Square, just south of the High Street, is older than all of it: Thomas Young began laying it out in 1685 and named it after James II. When the court left Kensington in the 1750s the square drifted, and by the 1830s eight academies were teaching in its houses. It is still a residential square today.
East of the square is Kensington Court, a development of houses and flats with a footnote in engineering history. Its generating station at No. 46, built in 1888 by R. E. B. Crompton’s Kensington Court Electric Lighting Company, made these among the first homes in Britain with a permanent electricity supply. South towards Gloucester Road come the Victorian terraces and stucco of Victoria Road and Launceston Place, with mansion blocks along the way. High Street Kensington station, on the Circle and District lines, is the local stop for most front doors.
Is St Mary’s mostly flats or houses?
| Homes that are | Share |
|---|---|
| Flats of any kind | 78.5% |
| Terraced houses | 14.7% |
| Owned outright | 29.2% |
| One bedroom | 22.8% |
| Two bedrooms | 35.2% |
| Built before 1919 | 84.2% |
| No central heating | 4.0% |
Mostly flats. St Mary’s falls in census area Kensington and Chelsea 010, running from the church and Kensington Square down through Kensington Court and Victoria Road towards Queen’s Gate Terrace. In it, 78.5% of homes are flats, and two bedrooms is the most common size (35.2%), with one-bedroom homes at 22.8%. The houses that remain are mostly terraced (14.7%), the tall family houses off Victoria Road and around the square where the stair carpet is the hardest-worked piece of floor in the building.
The carpet here tends to be old and good. 84.2% of homes were built before 1919, and 29.2% are owned outright; owners who have lived with a good wool carpet for years usually want it cleaned and kept. Three bedrooms, a sitting room and the main flight in a terraced house off Victoria Road add up to £192. Only 4.0% of homes have no central heating, but in those few, a cleaned wool carpet in winter needs a window open and a heater on to dry in good time.
Figures: ONS Census 2021 (Kensington and Chelsea 010) and VOA council tax stock, March 2024.
Access around the church and the High Street
Every street here is controlled and visitor vouchers do not exist in this borough, so the van goes in a pay-by-phone bay that we pay for. The hours depend on which side of the area you live. On the council’s residents’ parking map, the streets by the church, from Young Street and Derry Street across to De Vere Gardens, sit in the band controlled 8.30am to 10pm on weekdays, until 6.30pm on Saturdays and from 1pm to 5pm on Sundays. Victoria Road and Launceston Place have the same weekday hours, but Saturday controls end at 1.30pm and Sundays are free.
For the mansion blocks, all we need is the porter’s name or the entry-phone code, and the lift booked if the building asks for it. For the houses, the hose runs from the van up the front steps, so a clear hall helps: shoes off the stairs, coats off the newel post. The parish school has its drop-off and pick-up, so on the streets nearest it we aim to arrive after the morning school run.
How much does carpet cleaning cost in St Mary’s?
We give you the full figure before we come, there is no fee for turning up, and the prices match every other part of Kensington and Chelsea.
- 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
Name the rooms, the stairs and any sofa, and we will price it there and then. Get a free quote, or call us on 020 8077 8090.
Old wool, fine rugs and plane-tree grit
The core of the work is hot-water extraction, our steam carpet cleaning, which rinses dirt out of the pile and leaves the carpet dry within 6 to 7 hours. On wool we run it cooler and with less moisture, so the pile is not shocked and the colours stay put. We clean sofas and armchairs in the home through our upholstery cleaning, matched to the fabric, and rugs get a proper shampoo and rinse under rug cleaning, vacuumed and pre-treated first. Each autumn the London planes shed, and the fine black grit from the squares and pavements comes in on shoes and settles into pale pile; we lift it out of the base of the carpet. Old wool walked flat in a doorway for decades comes up clean, but no clean can stand worn pile back up, and we will tell you on arrival which is dirt and which is wear. If you have a home elsewhere in the rest of Kensington and Chelsea, or near neighbours on Kensington High Street and over towards Holland Park, the same team and the same prices apply.
Asked by St Mary’s customers
Which W8 streets around St Mary Abbots church do you cover?
All of them: the south end of Kensington Church Street, Kensington Square, Young Street, Derry Street, Kensington Court, Victoria Road, Launceston Place and De Vere Gardens, and across the High Street into Wright’s Lane, Iverna Gardens and Marloes Road. If your postcode begins W8 and you are near the church or the High Street, you are inside our patch, with no travel charge.
Parking is tight in W8, so how do you manage access?
We pay for it and plan it. The borough’s kerbs are almost all paid or residents’ bays, and near the church the residents’ bays are controlled on Sunday afternoons as well. We use the nearest paid bay and the parking app, so you are never asked to find us a space; for a mansion block we just need the porter or the entry code.
Can you clean old wool carpets and antique rugs safely?
Yes, and most of what we clean in St Mary’s is exactly that. Wool and silk-mix rugs need lower heat, controlled moisture and a gentle rinse, so for a delicate or antique one we ask for a photo first and say whether it can be cleaned safely on site. Sturdier wool is cleaned in your home, with the pile groomed afterwards.
How long until the carpet is dry and we can use the room?
Carpets take up to 6 to 7 hours to dry, since the extraction pulls the moisture back out with the dirt, so a morning clean is ready by the evening. Lower-ground and ground-floor flats with less airflow can take longer, so we open things up, and on a thick wool pile we can leave an air mover running for a while to help.
Can you fit a clean in before a family event at the church?
Yes, if you give us a little notice. A christening or wedding party often comes back to the house, and the reception room and hall are what guests see. Book us for the day before, or for the morning of if the event is that evening; the carpet takes up to 6 to 7 hours to dry, and the furniture goes back once it is dry.
Can you do anything about a carpet faded by a sunny window?
We can clean it, and that often makes the fade look less stark, because dirt dulls the unfaded part of the room too. A clean cannot put back dye that sunlight has taken out of the fibre. The tall south-facing sashes in these houses are where it happens most, so on the day we show you where the colour has gone and what a clean will change.
Our re-clean guarantee covers every St Mary’s booking: should a mark we treated come back, we return and clean it again for nothing. We carry full insurance, every cleaner is DBS-checked, and Kensington has been on our rounds since 2009.
