South Tottenham (N15) is my doorstep, often under 10 minutes door-to-door, 15 to 20 at the outside if the High Road is packed. The housing mix here is tighter-packed Victorian terracing plus a handful of post-war estates around the Broadwater Farm edge, so expect a wider variety of lock ages on front doors than further north.
The streets running south off the High Road, around West Green Road and Philip Lane, are dominated by late-Victorian terraces, two and three storey, many of them now split into flat conversions with shared entrance doors. Closer to Tottenham Green and the South Tottenham station you’ll find more period flat conversions sitting above the parade-style shop frontages, and on the Broadwater Farm edge there’s the post-war council stock, system-built blocks with their own characteristic 1970s lock fittings still in place on plenty of doors. Most of the Victorian houses retain their original 5-lever mortice paired with a Yale night latch added decades later, which is the typical front-door setup across Haringey’s older streets.
The three calls I get most often in N15 are mortice servicing on the original Victorian front doors, UPVC multipoint gearbox failures on newer estate stock and replacement back doors, and snapped keys in tired night latches. The mortice servicing is usually a strip-and-clean job on the bench, the case is sound, the levers just need a regrease after decades of use. The UPVC gearboxes follow the standard pattern, handle lifts but hooks won’t engage, and I carry the common replacement units in the van. Snapped keys in night latches happen because the spring weakens over time, the customer applies more pressure to compensate, and eventually the key shears at the shoulder. Spiral extraction saves the lock body in nearly every case.