After builders cleaning in Westminster

Westminster lets builders make noise from 8am to 6pm on weekdays and from 8am to 1pm on Saturdays. Sundays and bank holidays are off limits without special permission, and demolition, excavation and piling are not allowed on a Saturday unless the council has agreed it. Anything outside those hours, scaffolding and facade cleaning included, needs out of hours approval; the council aims to answer most requests within 10 working days.

Those hours decide the date of the clean. Book the crew for the first day after the last sanding, cutting or plastering, because fine dust keeps coming down for a day or so after the tools stop. If the programme ends at 1pm on a Saturday, a Monday start is usually the better slot. Fridays and weekends go first, and about a week's notice is normally enough.

Bigger sites, and every new or extended basement, also work under the council's Code of Construction Practice; the revised 2026 code has covered existing sites from 1 September 2026.

Westminster has no household reuse and recycling centre of its own. Residents use Smugglers Way in Wandsworth, where car visits are booked, or the council's mobile recycling events. A resident arriving by van can leave 100 litres of DIY waste, or one large item such as a bath or a door, free once every seven days. Plasterboard is taken only in very small amounts, and anything over the limit costs £286.70 a tonne with a £154.82 minimum; separated rubble and tiles go to Cringle Dock at a lower rate.

That allowance is for a resident's own DIY, and vans are checked to keep traders out, so rubble, offcuts and old plasterboard from a builder's job are for the builder or a licensed waste carrier to remove; the crew does not take them. On the central shopping streets, Soho included, bags may go out only 30 minutes before collection, so builders' sacks cannot wait on the pavement.

The City Plan counts 56 conservation areas covering 78% of Westminster and more than 11,000 listed buildings and structures. Of 8,849 planning applications the council processed in 2022, 1,790 were for listed buildings. In practice that means plaster cornices, ceiling roses, sash windows with dusty boxes and old floorboards in a large share of Westminster homes. The crew dusts mouldings dry before anything wet touches them and keeps water light on old timber; Belgravia is whole streets of this.

Basements are limited by City Plan policy 50 to half the garden, one storey below the lowest original floor, at least a metre of soil on top and no more than 1.8 metres under the street. A basement dig puts fine dust into every room of the house, so it is priced as heavy work: a 4-bed house after a basement usually needs 4 cleaners for 5 hours, £632 all in (a dust clean after sanding and plastering sets out the order of work).