What Stoke Newington gardens are like
N16 has some of the longest back gardens in this part of London — the Victorian terraces off Stoke Newington Church Street and around Clissold Park often run to thirty metres, sometimes with a shed, a veg patch and a bit of lawn all fighting for the same light. Mature trees along the back boundaries drop leaves for two months of the year. The Church Street end is a mix of family gardens and rented flats where the garden is nobody’s job.
Towards Stamford Hill the plots are broader, with more hedges — privet mostly, some enormous laurel — and towards Rectory Road there are more conversions with a shared strip out the back.
What we do here
- Regular maintenance — weekly or fortnightly: mow, edge, weed, deadhead, tidy, leaves cleared in autumn (which in N16 is a job in itself).
- Hedges — long runs of privet and laurel, kept in shape twice a year; overgrown ones reduced properly rather than butchered. We avoid nesting season.
- Lawns — long gardens mean long lawns; we scarify and overseed in autumn and keep a mowing rhythm through the season.
- Clearance — the end-of-garden thicket behind the shed, the plot that’s been let go for a couple of years. Cleared, removed, and a plan for after.
Practical things
Side access is rarer than you’d hope; we bring kit that goes through a house and put sheets down. Leaf season is October to early December here — a fortnightly visit through those weeks keeps it manageable. Green waste leaves with us.