[title]
Between foxes breaking into bin bags, the Underground turning our bogies black and sewage being dumped into our water ways, as much as we love this city, no one can deny that it gets dirty AF. London has had trouble with its trash for a while (we investigated the issue back in 2022) and now, a Freedom of Information request by the Metro has unveiled which London streets are the filthiest of them all.
The FOI was sent to the City of London and all London boroughs asking how many reports they’d received about bins not being collected in 2023. It also wanted to know ‘which individual streets had the most missed bin reports, and if they keep records of reasons why bin collections were missed, what the most common reason was’.
After crunching all the data (Richmond-upon-Thames apparently didn’t respond in time), the Metro declared that Ewell Road in Kingston Upon Thames is officially the dirtiest street in the capital, with 308 missed bin reports last year.
Number two on the list of littered streets was Courtwood Lane in Croydon (281 missed bin reports) followed by Thomas Road in Tower Hamlets (249).
According to the stats, the title of dirtiest borough overall went to Croydon. The area had a total of 31,895 missed bin reports, which is equivalent to 88 bin collections being skipped each day. Despite that, Croydon Council said that its team completed 99.87 percent of all collections last year with no issues.
Bromley was the second dirtiest area with 31,026 reports of missed bins, followed by Bexley with 22,487, then Kensington and Chelsea.
On the flipside, the research found that the City of London was the cleanest part of the capital, though as the Metro points out, it has a much smaller population than other areas so there aren’t as many bins to empty.
Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel.
Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.