Street cleaning

Dedicated neighbourhood sweepers in your road

• Where possible, your neighbourhood street sweepers follow the same routes as the recycling and refuse collection rounds to clear up anything that may have been missed or spilled within hours of collection.
• Every sweeper has a mobile phone to report fly-tips and other issues to colleagues straight away. They also have separate rubbish and recycling bins on their barrows to increase recycling rates.
• Main roads are deep-cleaned every day.
• We are also responsible for clearing dog fouling, removing fly-tipping and graffiti, and cleaning street markets and council-owned car parks.

Cleaning facilities and timelines

• We have around 1,000 litter bins and over 100 on-street recycling banks that are spread throughout the borough that we empty regularly.

• We remove any racist, abusive or sexist graffiti within 24 hours of it being reported and most other types of graffiti are removed within five working days. 

• We aim to remove fly-tipped waste from public land within 24 hours of being informed of it.

Autumn leaves

Islington has over 40,000 trees in the borough. The timing and rate of leaf fall  changes year-to-year and this is due to variations in weather such as heat, rainfall levels, wind and frost. However, experience shows that the main clear-up operation for leaf-fall is between November and December.

For most streets in the borough the normal street cleaning operatives will deal with leaf-fall but for heavily tree-lined streets such as Highbury New Park, we provide assistance with larger mechanised street-sweeping machines. We also work with colleagues in our Greenspace service to tackle the large quantity of leaf-fall from selected residential streets.

‘Leafing’ season is the most difficult period of the year for street cleaning operatives and we are grateful to local residents for the patience during those periods as we collect the leaves. As the rate of leaf-fall changes through the season, the amount of time taken to complete one full cycle of the street cleaning operatives' regular schedules is unpredictable. It is not always possible to provide firm dates for when each street will be completely cleared of leaves.

How you can help 

Everyone can contribute to improving our environment and making Islington a better place to live, work and visit. You could sign up to maintain a tree pit on your street.

Our authorised officers can issue fixed penalty notices to people that drop litter, including cigarette butts, or those that allow their dogs to foul and fail to clear it up. 

Contact us

Street cleaning in Islington is completed on an area basis. Islington is divided into three areas and we have a manager responsible for each area. Your area managers are:

• Central area – Daniel Allen
• North area – Tony Montgomery
• South area – Bill Reay 

Report an issue

You can report an issue on a street in Islington in the following ways: