CCTV repair and installation in Hampstead

Most Hampstead briefs start with the front door, the side return and the garden gate, because that is where deliveries, gates and boundary access all happen. We survey those approaches at eye height before quoting, since a camera that sees the top of somebody's head is no use to anyone.

Cable routes matter more here than the cameras. On listed and conservation-area properties we run everything internally where possible, use existing chases and soffit lines, and colour-match brackets so the installation reads as part of the building rather than bolted onto it.

Hampstead's older stock runs from double-fronted Georgian and Victorian houses on Flask Walk and Well Walk to villas around Frognal and Redington Road, many set behind brick walls or hedging with a side return running to a rear garden. Steep, narrow streets such as Holly Hill and Christchurch Hill mean parking and pedestrian sightlines are tight, so a camera pointed straight down a pavement often catches passers-by rather than the actual approach. Basements and lower-ground flats add a second entrance below street level that owners frequently forget to cover, and mature front gardens can block a porch camera's view of the gate entirely.

On a period façade the usual fix is a small camera under the eaves or on the door canopy rather than a bracket drilled into dressed stone or render that a conservation officer would notice. We route cable through an existing airbrick, a redundant meter box, or inside a downpipe rather than surface-clipping across brickwork, and where the front is genuinely untouchable we run internally through the loft and drop down inside a stud wall to a low-level faceplate near the door. This keeps the elevation looking exactly as it did before the job and avoids the repeated re-drilling that damages soft London stock brick over time.

Frognal and the roads off Redington Road often have long rear gardens backing onto other gardens or a mews, and that boundary is usually where an intruder actually comes from rather than the front gate. A camera on the rear elevation angled along the garden wall, set higher than head height and slightly downward, covers the fence line without looking into a neighbour's windows. Cabling to a rear position usually runs through the loft and down an internal wall or via the side return conduit already carrying gas and water pipework, which avoids a visible cable run down a rendered side elevation.

Recorders in these houses are best kept off the ground floor entirely — a cupboard under the stairs or a loft hatch keeps a hard drive away from flooding risk in houses with older lead plumbing and the odd historic leak. We size storage on how many cameras are recording continuously versus on motion only; a four-camera house recording continuously in colour at night typically needs a multi-terabyte drive to hold two to three weeks, more if the household wants a longer look-back. A wired network back to the router, rather than relying on Hampstead's mix of thick walls and patchy Wi-Fi, keeps remote viewing reliable.