TV aerial repairs and installation in Queen's Park

Queen's Park is built almost entirely of late Victorian and Edwardian terraces laid out in long straight runs either side of Salusbury Road, with the tighter artisans' cottages of the Queen's Park Estate on the W10 side and the wider, leafier avenues of Brondesbury Park climbing away to the north east. Roof pitches are shallow slate with a shared party-wall chimney every second house, and because the streets run in unbroken lines the roofscape steps only slightly from one end to the other — which sounds ideal for reception until you account for the mature street trees along Harvist Road and the park's own tree line, both of which sit exactly in the path many houses need towards Crystal Palace. Newer mansard conversions and rear extensions have also raised roof heights unevenly along several streets, so a chimney position that worked for twenty years can now sit in the shadow of the neighbour's loft.

The party-wall chimney stack shared between two Queen's Park terraces is the single biggest practical constraint on aerial work here. Many were repointed cheaply in the eighties, and a fair number now carry a mix of old aerial brackets, a satellite bracket and a redundant pot or two, which means a new lashing kit has to be sited on sound brickwork rather than wherever there happens to be a gap. Where the stack is doubtful we prefer a short wall mount at the rear eaves or on the back addition roof; that keeps the fixing on a wall we can properly inspect and keeps the front elevation clear, which matters on the estate streets and the conservation-designated runs off Chamberlayne Road.

Satellite work needs a clear look south-southeast, and on these east–west streets that usually falls across the rear garden — good news, because the rear addition wall is normally the tidiest place to mount a dish and gives the shortest cable run into a ground-floor living room. The exception is the narrower cottage streets on the estate, where the back gardens are short and the neighbouring return wall can clip the sightline; there we meter from two or three candidate positions before drilling anything, and occasionally the best result comes from the flank wall at first-floor level rather than the obvious spot at the back.

Flat conversions are the other half of our work in NW6. A large share of Queen's Park terraces are split into an upper maisonette and a garden flat, and the aerial cabling was very often extended once when the house was divided and again when somebody added a bedroom point. That leaves passive splitters in odd cupboards, mixed cable ages, and a signal that is perfectly healthy at the aerial but marginal by the time it reaches the third outlet. We test at the aerial, then at each splitter, and in most cases restoring the picture is a matter of rationalising the internal distribution rather than putting anything new on the roof.