Drains, terraces and the River Lea
Tottenham's Victorian terraces sit on drainage that has served the area for well over a century, and a cracked pipe or a shifted joint under one of these multi-let streets gives rats a way up from the sewer into a floor void with no obvious hole outside. The ground running down towards the River Lea holds water close to the surface, which keeps that older pipework under more strain than newer drainage elsewhere in the borough.
Gardens backing onto the railway
A good stretch of Haringey, not just Tottenham, has streets whose back gardens run down to a railway cutting or embankment, and that strip of scrubby ground is cover a rat can use to move along a whole row of houses without crossing a road. If neighbours several doors along are seeing the same thing, the embankment rather than any one garden is probably the route.
Harringay's ladder streets
The terraces between Green Lanes and the railway that give Harringay its ladder-street layout share party walls the same way Tottenham's do, so activity heard through a wall is worth mentioning to the neighbour on the other side of it before assuming the problem starts and ends at your own front door.
The order that gets rid of them
- Confirm the animal, and note where and when you have seen or heard it
- Remove easy food outdoors: bird feeders, split bin bags, food left down for pets overnight
- Book treatment rather than laying poison where children, pets or local wildlife could reach it
- Leave any holes you find open for now, so nothing is sealed inside a wall
- Once activity stops, close the route properly rather than just tidying up
Closing the route for good
Treatment clears the rats that are there; the gap they used stays until someone deals with it separately. Above ground that means sealing around pipes, worn thresholds and damaged airbrick covers with materials rats cannot chew through. Our rodent proofing service covers exactly this kind of accessible gap. Where the route runs through the drains themselves, a camera survey and repair below ground is the only fix that lasts.
Booking rat control in Haringey
Rat control anywhere in Haringey is £190 for a flat and £240 for a house, and because around Wood Green, where dense flats and terraces around the shopping centre and High Road, mentioning that when you book rat control points us towards the likely route in, with the rest of the detail on the Haringey rat control page.
