Carpet cleaning in Hertford

Working in Hertford

Hertford is a genuinely old town centre rather than a Victorian suburb, so the core is timber-framed and Georgian-fronted houses along Fore Street, Bull Plain and Castle Street, many of them listed, with uneven original boards, low ceilings and steep narrow stairs. Around that sit Victorian terraces in Port Vale, Cowbridge and the streets below Bengeo, then interwar and postwar estates climbing the ridge towards Sele Farm and Foxholes. More recently the old maltings and industrial plots along the Lea have been converted into riverside apartments, which is where most of the town's modern rented stock now is.

The Saturday charter market takes over Salisbury Square, Maidenhead Street, Railway Street and Bircherley Green, with fruit, vegetable and fish stalls also trading on Fridays, so no vehicle gets near a town-centre address on a Saturday morning and jobs there have to be booked mid-week.

East Herts runs resident permit schemes in the streets around the centre and both stations, and the paid car parks at Hartham Lane, Old London Road, St Andrew Street, Port Vale and Gascoyne Way are the practical fallback for a working vehicle.

Hertfordshire tap water is very hard at around 300 ppm from the chalk aquifer, so wool and wool-mix carpets rinse harsh and dry stiff unless the final pass is softened or acidified.

The water here is hard, which makes no difference to the extraction rinse. What slows drying in these houses is closed trickle vents, so we open windows while we work.