What Is Usually Found Instead
Most of the insects taken for cockroaches in a house like this turn out to be something with a much duller story. A dark, hard-shelled beetle walking across a kitchen floor at night has generally come in from the garden through a back door left open on a warm evening and will not breed indoors. A steady single-file procession along a worktop is ants. A small, round, mottled insect sitting still on a sunny sill in April is a carpet beetle, and carpet beetle treatment is the page for that. Scuttling overhead or droppings in a cupboard belong to mouse control in Dollis Hill rather than here.
What would actually point at a cockroach is the combination of speed, long antennae and a flattened body that disappears into a crack the moment a light goes on, plus droppings like coarse ground pepper and dark capsule-shaped egg cases behind an appliance. The signs guide runs through the evidence, and photographing whatever you find before it gets away is the single most useful thing you can do.
The Three Situations Where They Do Turn Up
A flat inside a converted house
Some of these houses have been divided, and a division changes the building's behaviour. Pipes and cables were threaded through joists and party walls when the work was done, the holes around them were rarely sealed properly, and a boxed run of hot pipework becomes a warm corridor from one kitchen to another. German cockroaches use exactly that kind of route without ever going outdoors, which the guide on movement between flats describes.
A kitchen backing onto commercial premises
Where a home sits against a parade or shares a boundary with a unit that cooks, the conditions change again. A commercial kitchen holds its heat overnight and runs its extraction and waste through the same fabric as whatever is next to it, and insects travel sideways along that fabric more readily than they cross open ground. If you back onto premises like that, say so when you ring, because it changes where the search goes.
Something carried in
The third route is ordinary luggage of one kind or another: flattened cardboard from a delivery, a crate of stock brought home, a second-hand fridge or microwave, a bag that spent the week in a warm store room. That kind of arrival usually gives you a handful of insects in one room rather than an established population, and dealing with it early keeps it that way. The guide to how they get in covers the same ground in more detail.
Telling the Two Species Apart Before Anyone Panics
There are two that matter in London and they live in different parts of a building. The German cockroach is about a centimetre and a half, light brown, with a pair of dark bars behind the head, and it stays close to heat: behind a fridge motor, inside the casing of a microwave, in the void behind a kickboard. The Oriental one reaches two and a half centimetres, is very dark and glossy, moves slowly, climbs badly and prefers cool damp - a gully by the back door, a cellar step where a house has one, the ground behind the bins. The comparison guide settles which you have, and that answer decides whether the problem is really about heat or really about damp.
What to Do the Night You See One
- Go back into the kitchen in the small hours, switch the light on and note which gap it runs into
- Take a photograph, or trap it under a glass, so there is something to identify rather than a memory
- Empty the cupboard under the sink and the one beside the cooker so the backs can be reached
- Dry the sink and shower tray last thing and fix a dripping tap, because damp holds them as firmly as crumbs
- Move cereal, rice, flour and pet food into sealed boxes and take the worktop crumbs off at night
- Do not set off a shop-bought fogger: it scatters them into wall voids and, in a converted house, next door
Booking a House, a Flat or Premises
Tell us what the address is - a whole house, a flat carved out of one, or trading premises - along with the room, the time of night and the gap they vanish into. A flat is £190 and a house is £240, and where a house has a cellar or an extension those count as part of it rather than as extras. Cafés, takeaways, shops and other food premises are quoted per site instead, because the kitchen, the storage and the trading hours differ everywhere; anyone running a food business has a legal duty to keep pests out of the places where food is prepared and stored, so one sighting has to be acted on.
Afterwards, and Keeping a Kitchen Uninviting
Sightings for a while after a visit, as eggs already laid hatch out, are ordinary rather than a failure, and this guide explains the pattern; ring us again if they carry on past the period we give you. For the longer term the work is dull and effective: seal the gaps where waste and heating pipes pass through walls and floors, break packaging down outside instead of stacking it in a utility room, run the extractor while you cook and keep the strip behind the plinth clear enough to see. The prevention guide has the rest, and nobody needs to feel awkward about the call, since cleanliness is not what decides it.
Cockroach Control Brent covers the borough, the Brent cockroach advice takes the first steps in order, and flats above the shops in neighbouring Willesden are priced the same way.
