Painter & decorator in Surbiton.

Every town has a founding story, and Surbiton's is a snub: Kingston refused the railway in the 1830s, so the line ran through fields to the south and a station rose where none had been planned. The town that grew around those tracks became one of London's first true commuter suburbs, and the sixteen-minute run to Waterloo still shapes everything we do here. Villas went up for Victorian professionals within sight of the smoke; Art Deco courts followed in the thirties; and today's landlords measure void periods in days, not weeks. Our Surbiton diary reflects all three eras running at once.

South of the station the avenues settle into a rhythm — substantial townhouses with bay windows, tiled paths, and reception rooms that take patterned wallpaper beautifully. These are full projects: ceilings to wash down and stabilise, cornicing to cast or repair, sash windows to prepare and ease before a hand-finished gloss goes anywhere near them. Towards Berrylands and Tolworth the houses step down to interwar semis, where the questions are practical ones about scrub-resistant wall paint and kitchen spraying that returns the room to service in days rather than weeks.

North towards the river the mood softens again. The old Seething Wells filter beds sit beside the Thames, Raven's Ait hosts weddings a short walk from suburban streets, and the Portsmouth Road threads towards Long Ditton past properties whose garden rooms and studios take the weather off open water. Between the two sit the conservation streets around St Mark's Hill and the busy independent stretch of Victoria Road and Maple Road, where cafés ask us to repaint overnight and salons book us for Sundays. The Good Life put Surbiton's self-sufficiency on television forty years ago; the modern version is a town that expects trades to turn up on time, specify properly, and finish clean. That expectation suits us — it is how we prefer to work anyway. Expect a written schedule, daily clean-downs, and a finish that photographs honestly.