Pest Control Stockwell

Pest Control in Stockwell

Stockwell is a densely built inner-London neighbourhood in the SW postcode area, wedged between Brixton, Vauxhall and Clapham. The streets are packed with Victorian and Edwardian terraces, many converted into flats, alongside council-built estates and some newer apartment blocks. That density and the age of the housing is what drives the pest picture here. Mice are one of the most common problems we deal with in Stockwell. The terraced houses share party walls and mice move through gaps in those walls, around shared pipework and along cable routes without ever coming outside. In converted flats the shared risers and service voids between units create ready-made highways for mice to travel between floors. A single gap around a pipe under the kitchen sink is often all it takes for them to get in.

Rats are well embedded in this part of south London. The Victorian drainage beneath these streets is old and often in poor condition, with cracked pipes and broken joints giving rats a route up from the sewers into the ground-floor areas of properties. The railway lines that cut through Stockwell on their way to Waterloo and Victoria provide another corridor, with rats living along the embankments and in the scrubby margins beside the tracks. The food waste from the busy restaurants, takeaways and shops along Stockwell Road and South Lambeth Road adds to the attraction. Properties backing onto the railway or close to the main commercial strips tend to see the most rat activity.

Bed bugs are also an issue in Stockwell, often turning up in the multi-occupancy buildings and flats where the turnover of residents is higher. Wasp nests appear every summer in the roof spaces and wall cavities of the older houses, despite the urban setting. Even in a neighbourhood this built-up, wasps find nesting spots in the fabric of the older buildings.