Southgate (N14) is 15 minutes up to the west of my Tottenham base, typically 25 to 38 minutes door-to-door. N14 is mostly classic 1930s suburban London, semi-detached houses with their original mortice locks, usually worth servicing, plus UPVC replacement doors from the 2000s wave, now hitting gearbox-failure age.
The housing here is dominated by interwar semi-detached estates running through Cannon Hill, Osidge Lane and The Bourne, three and four bedroom family homes with substantial timber front doors and the original 1930s ironwork still in place on a fair share of them. Along Chase Side you’ve got interwar parades with flats above the shops, and near the station there’s a layer of newer flat blocks with composite doors and Euro cylinders. Most of the suburban front doors run a 5-lever BS3621 mortice paired with a Yale night latch, and a back door that’s typically been replaced in the 2000s with a UPVC multipoint, now twenty-odd years old.
The three jobs I see most often in N14 are 1930s mortice servicing, UPVC multipoint wear, and Euro-cylinder upgrades on replacement composite doors. The original mortices generally pay to be serviced rather than replaced, the case is solid cast iron and built to last another fifty years if the levers are clean and lubricated. The UPVC gearbox failures are now a weekly call across the suburbs of N14, handle lifts but the hooks and bolts won’t engage, and I carry the common Yale, ERA and Fuhr replacement gearboxes in the van. The Euro-cylinder upgrades come up when a homeowner has either fitted a new composite door at the front or wants to bring an existing one up to BS Kitemark 3★ anti-snap standard, fitted at a flat £120.