Muswell Hill (N10) is 12 minutes west via the A504 from my Tottenham base, typically 20 to 32 minutes door-to-door depending on Muswell Hill Road. The housing here is dominated by larger Edwardian family houses with original front-door hardware that generally pays to be serviced rather than replaced. A lot of my N10 work is planned security upgrades on high-value homes, not emergency lockouts.
The streets running off the Broadway, along Fortis Green, Colney Hatch Lane and Park Road, are characterised by large Edwardian semi-detached and detached family houses, four and five bedrooms, with substantial timber front doors and often a side entrance with its own mortice. Above the shops on the Broadway and around Queen’s Parade you’ll find period flat conversions, and there’s a handful of 1930s mansion blocks scattered in between. Most of these front doors retain their original 5-lever mortice locks, paired with a Yale night latch fitted at some point in the last forty or fifty years.
The bulk of my N10 work is planned rather than emergency. The most common job is a 3★ anti-snap cylinder upgrade on a high-value front door, often as part of a wider security review when a homeowner has had a near-miss or a neighbour has been targeted. Right behind that comes mortice servicing on the heritage doors, where the original case is fine but the levers are sticking after decades of use, a strip-and-clean on the bench restores the action. The third frequent job is a planned keyed-alike setup across front, back and side doors of a family house, so one key turns every lock on the property. That’s a half-day job, all priced flat.