Window & Exterior Cleaning in Hove

Hove's seafront is a storm beach — shingle rather than sand, built up by heavier surf than a gently sloping beach would see, and that means more spray and salt carried onto the squares and avenues that back directly onto the promenade. Brunswick Square, Adelaide Crescent and Palmeira Square all sit close enough to catch it, and their stucco-fronted Regency facades, decorative cast-iron balconies and tall sash windows aren't well suited to a pressure washer. Forcing water at high pressure into old stucco or ironwork can crack render, strip protective coatings and accelerate the rust that salt air already encourages. Purified water and a soft brush on a water-fed pole clean the same salt residue and grime without any of that risk — the gentler method matters more here than almost anywhere else we cover, given how much of Hove's seafront is built from render and ironwork rather than brick.

Brunswick Town, the Regency estate that gave Hove its first real identity as a resort, is protected as a conservation area containing more than 550 individually listed properties — over 100 of them Grade I and around 40 Grade II*, an unusually high concentration for a seaside town this size. A little further along the seafront, the Cliftonville conservation area holds a different but equally distinctive mix of Italianate villas and large Tudorbethan houses from the town's mid-Victorian growth. Both conservation areas were designated back in 1969, among the first in the city, and both call for the same careful approach: purified water and a soft brush rather than anything that risks the render, stonework or decorative detailing that earned them their protected status.

Across Brighton and Hove as a whole there are 34 separate conservation areas, covering more than 18% of the built-up area — a genuinely high proportion, and Hove's share of it, from Brunswick Town and Cliftonville through to the Victorian villas of First to Fourth Avenue, means a very large share of the town's housing sits in a protected area of one kind or another. That density of listed and locally protected buildings is part of why choosing a gentle, purified-water method matters more consistently here than in a town with a smaller historic core.

Not every property in Hove dates from the Regency or Victorian era. The town has filled in with 20th-century housing further back from the seafront, and Portslade, merged with Hove in 1974, sits immediately to the west on the way towards Shoreham. These newer streets sit further from the direct salt spray of the promenade, but Hove's position on the coast still means more airborne salt reaches glass and render here than it would a few miles inland — enough that regular cleaning still makes a real difference to how a property looks between visits.

The decorative cast-iron balconies, railings and verandas that line so many of Hove's seafront terraces are as much a part of the town's character as the stucco itself, but ironwork and salt air are a genuinely poor combination — left uncleaned, sea-borne salt speeds up the corrosion that eventually shows as rust stains bleeding down white render. Regularly rinsing that ironwork alongside the glass and frames it sits between helps slow that process, which is one more reason a water-fed pole and purified water suits Hove's seafront squares better than a method built around scrubbing render alone.

Hove's transformation from fishing hamlet to fashionable resort happened remarkably fast. The 1801 census recorded only 101 residents in the village; by 1821, as Brighton's growing reputation as a resort began to spill westward along the coast, that had already grown to 312. The real change came with the development of the Brunswick estate — grand Regency townhouses built close to the Brighton boundary, complete with their own theatre and riding schools, aimed squarely at wealthy visitors looking for an address a little quieter than Brighton itself.

Two further estates followed between the old village and Brunswick: Cliftonville and the West Brighton Estate, both deliberately built up under names other than Hove, since the original village still carried a reputation for poverty that the developers were keen to avoid. Adelaide Crescent and Palmeira Square, with its ornamental floral clock, date from this period, along with the long run of Victorian villas on First, Second, Third and Fourth Avenue — wide, leafy streets that still give this part of Hove a noticeably calmer character than the seafront a short walk south.

Portslade, a separate town in its own right for most of its history, was formally merged into the borough of Hove in 1974, and today sits between Hove and Shoreham-by-Sea along the coast road. The distinction between Hove and its larger neighbour Brighton has stayed a point of local pride — the phrase 'Hove, actually', used to gently correct anyone who assumes the whole conurbation is simply Brighton, became well known enough in the 1990s to be picked up in national tourism coverage, and it still captures something genuine about how Hove sees itself.

We're based in Storrington, reached along the coast road via Shoreham-by-Sea, and we cover Hove as part of our regular service area alongside the rest of this stretch of coast.