Cleaning across Dunstable and the Downs villages

General Motors shut the truck plant in 1987. It reopened under the AWD name, went into receivership and closed for good in 1992 after a large order for the Libyan army was stopped by UN sanctions, and the buildings came down. What stands on the land now says most of what you need to know about the town's economy: a Sainsbury's, White Lion Retail Park on the A505 Luton Road with its access off Boscombe Road, and the Superdrug and Savers distribution centre. Dunstable moves boxes. Woodside Industrial Estate off Humphrys Road runs to roughly 96 acres and 1.4 million sq ft across 34 units. WH Smith's distribution centre is on Verey Road on the same estate, and Amazon took 310,000 sq ft at Prologis Park Dunstable in 2015 with around 500 jobs behind it. Superdrug and Savers run a recovery unit at their Dunstable centre that washes totes and repairs cages, which tells you what the working day looks like round here. Whitbread runs its head office from Whitbread Court on Houghton Hall Business Park, off Porz Avenue. Commercial cleaning in Dunstable therefore means warehouse floors, loading bays, welfare units, canteens and trade counters on a shift pattern, not glass office towers. Central Bedfordshire Council is run from Priory House at Chicksands rather than from here, so the town never picked up the office quarter that a county town carries.

Two roads opened in 2017 and changed how anyone gets about. The A5 to M1 link, the Dunstable Northern Bypass, opened on 11 May: 2.8 miles of dual carriageway from the A5 at Thorn Turn north of the town to a new M1 junction 11a south of Chalton. The A5505 Woodside Link had opened on 13 April, 1.8 miles off the same junction, with the route carrying on along Porz Avenue and Boscombe Road to meet the A505 beside the site of the old Dunstable Town station. The old A5 through the middle was de-trunked, and the stretch through town is now the A5183 with a 7.5 tonne limit on it. There is still no railway station. Dunstable Town closed to passengers on 26 April 1965, and the Luton to Dunstable Busway opened in September 2013 along the route of the old line, 10 km of it with 7.5 km of concrete guideway. Everybody else drives, which is why so many houses here are empty from eight in the morning.

The estates built around the truck plant are seventy years old and more now, and they are turning over. Families are clearing houses that have not been properly emptied since the 1960s, buyers and landlords take them on, and either way the first job is the same: get the place back to a state somebody would live in. That is deep cleaning, and sometimes it is clearance done slowly and privately over several visits rather than in one hard day.

There is a lot of building on the Houghton Regis side. Linmere, the urban extension north of the town, has consent for up to 5,150 homes with Lands Improvement as master developer for Aviva and the Diocese of St Albans, Bellway delivering the first houses, three new schools, more than 190 acres of green space and a neighbourhood centre approved in August 2024. Closer in, Tavistock Place put 44 affordable rent and 11 shared ownership homes on disused industrial land half a mile from the centre, and 61 affordable homes went up on the corner of Brewers Hill Road and High Street North on the former Trico site, where vehicle parts were made until 2003 and the buildings came down in 2005. The old fire station site sits next to it. Work of that shape hands over in small groups rather than all at once, so it wants a cleaner who will come back rather than one who turns up at the end.

Schools here are mid-change. Central Bedfordshire closed three Dunstable middle schools, Brewers Hill, Streetfield and Ashton, across 2015 and 2016, which pushed the town towards two tiers. It is not a tidy two tiers: Priory Academy on Britain Street still takes pupils at Year 5 and keeps them to Year 11, while Queensbury Academy on Langdale Road and All Saints Academy on Houghton Road take them at 11, and Manshead CE Academy on Dunstable Road at Caddington has done the same since 2014. Fewer, larger sites means the whole town's deep cleaning lands in the same holiday weeks. Anyone we put into a school is Enhanced DBS checked.

Then there is what comes in on people's feet. Dunstable Downs reaches 243 metres and is the highest ground in Bedfordshire, National Trust land inside the Chilterns National Landscape, with the Five Knolls barrow cemetery at its northern end, seven barrows despite the name. Blow's Down does the same job on the eastern side of town, a chalk grassland site of special scientific interest looked after by the Wildlife Trust, reached from the eastern end of Half Moon Lane where there is no car park and everybody leaves the car on the street. Chalk mud behaves nothing like garden soil: it dries pale and powdery, it works down into a carpet pile instead of sitting on it, and wiping at it while it is still wet spreads it wider than you started. Any house within a walk of the escarpment has a hallway that shows it, and so does a site compound cut into chalk.