Map shows London’s filthiest streets – do you live on it?

The filthiest streets in London have been revealed – and the figures don’t make for pleasant reading.

Ewell Road in Kingston Upon Thames has been named the dirtiest street in the capital after there were 308 missed bin collections there in 2023.

Metro sent Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to all of London’s boroughs as well as the City of London to find out how many reports they received about bins not being collected in 2023.

We also asked them 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.

Despite Ewell Road in Kingston Upon Thames being the dirtiest street overall, the filthiest borough in London was Croydon, which received 31,895 reports of bin collections being missed.

That’s the equivalent of 88 bins being missed every single day, or more than 2,600 missed each month.

But Croydon council said despite the high number, their crews completed 99.87% of all collections last year with no issues.

In second place was Bromley, which had 31,026 missed bin reports last year, and Bexley was in third place, with 22,487 missed bins.

Only four London boroughs keep records of the reasons crews gave for bins not being collected – and three out of four of them said the most common reason was that the bin simply hadn’t been out in the first place, so bin crews weren’t able to collect it.

The fourth council, Kensington and Chelsea, said the most common response they had for complaints about missed bins was that they had, in fact, collected the rubbish being complained about.

Unfortunately Metro doesn’t have data for the entirety of London because Richmond Upon Thames council are still significantly overdue responding to our FOI.

But from the figures we do have, we found that across London there were 303,873 missed bin collections during 2023, which is the equivalent of 833 bins missed every single day.

What about the cleanest boroughs?

Considering its small size, it’s not surprising that the City of London is the area of London with the lowest reports of missed bin collections.

There were only 153 missed bin reports made in the City of London in 2023.

The second cleanest borough was Barking and Dagenham, with 437 missed bin collections last year, and Westminster was in third place with 848 reports.

It’s worth making clear that these figures are based purely on the number of reports each borough received, and aren’t weighted in any way relating to the number of homes or population size of each borough.

Over in Haringey, for example, the council said it missed 12,260 bins out of a total of more than 23.9million collections last year, meaning it only actually missed 0.0515% of collections.

And in Southwark, the council says it missed 5,807 collections out of a total of about 19.4million – another tiny percentage.

Of course it makes sense that the City of London and Westminster would have low numbers of missed bin reports, because their populations are much smaller than other boroughs, so there aren’t as many bins to empty in the first place.

City of London only has about 9,000 residents, for example, with about 250,000 living in Westminster and 210,000 people in Barking and Dagenham.

That’s compared to more than 385,000 people living in Croydon, 330,000 in Bromley, and almost 250,000 in Bexley.

A Croydon council spokesperson told Metro: ‘Our waste collection service undertakes over two million waste collections per month, of which 99.87% are completed on schedule which equates to less than a missed bin per crew per day.

‘Collecting resident’s bins on time is a key priority for the council and we encourage residents to report missed bin collections if they occur.

‘This can be done online or by contacting our call centre and we aim to rectify any reported missed collection within 24hrs of reporting.

‘We are always looking for ways to improve our service and work with residents.

‘Our recent announcement of an improved waste contract starting next year had residents at the heart of the decision-making process.

‘The industry standard is to measure missed collection rates per 100,000, not by total collections missed in a borough, as populations and number of properties vary, which would give a disproportionate figure, especially as Croydon is the highest populated borough in London.

‘According to the industry standard in London, Croydon is in the top 25% for waste collections being made on time.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].

For more stories like this, check our news page.

MORE: Disruption on roads and rail as Met Office issues yellow thunderstorm warning

MORE: What are police doing to stop phone snatchers? Metro went on patrol to find out

MORE: London Underground ‘ghost ride’ that sees trains stop at the same station twice