Cleaners in Milton Keynes, from Wolverton to Bletchley

Milton Keynes is not one age of housing but three, within a few miles of each other. There are the towns that were here before the new town was designated in 1967: Stony Stratford with its coaching inns on Watling Street, Wolverton and New Bradwell with the red brick terraces the railway company put up around the works after 1838. There are the Development Corporation estates of the 1970s, where Netherfield's 1,043 flat-roofed houses went up between 1972 and 1977 alongside Bean Hill, Coffee Hall and Eaglestone. Then everything since 2000: Brooklands, Oakgrove, Tattenhoe Park, Newton Leys, Whitehouse, Fairfields. A Victorian terrace, a fifty-year-old flat-roofed house and a plot handed over last month are three different jobs and should not be quoted off one sheet.

Then the sheer amount of new build. The council has beaten its government housebuilding target seven years running, and in the most recent reported year it passed the annual target of 1,767 homes inside nine months. The Western Expansion Area at Whitehouse and Fairfields covers 350 hectares and is planned for around 6,500 homes. Sites that size release plots in runs against a programme, so the clean has to sit inside the handover dates. What a builders clean covers is on our builders cleans page.

The rental market is big and has no term-time rhythm. At the 2021 census 19.2% of households here rented privately, up from 16.3% ten years earlier. But there is no large residential campus. The Open University is headquartered at Walton Hall but teaches at a distance, and the University of Bedfordshire's MK campus is a city-centre teaching site rather than a halls one. Tenancies end because people change jobs, and that happens in February as readily as September.

The employer base is more corporate than the size of the place suggests: over 12,500 businesses. Santander's UK headquarters is at Unity Place opposite MK Central station, Network Rail's national operations centre is in the Quadrant:MK on Elder Gate, Volkswagen Group UK has been at Blakelands since the 1970s and Red Bull Racing is on Bradbourne Drive in Tilbrook. Around them sit the trade and industrial estates, where warehouses and workshops need cleaning on their own hours rather than ours.

And the events side. The National Bowl off Watling Street holds up to 65,000, and Reggae Land ran there over three days and seven stages this summer with more than 120 artists billed. Clearing a site that size happens overnight, between days.