Mobile car wash in Great Ashby

Parking reality

A 1990s estate with 2020s car counts

Great Ashby did not exist before the 1990s. The name was coined for a new estate on the north eastern edge of Stevenage, built mainly in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a neighbourhood centre, a community hall and Round Diamond primary school, and it was still being built in 2014. The twist is the boundary: the estate straddles the line between Stevenage borough and North Hertfordshire district, and the North Herts part has been its own civil parish since 2011, with Great Ashby Community Council meeting at the community centre on Whitehorse Lane. Two councils, two bin days, one estate.

For parking it means the modern pattern: a drive or a court for most homes, and more cars than either was drawn for. Woodfield ward, which covers the Stevenage side, has 86 percent of households with a car and 48 percent with two or more; Chesfield ward on the North Herts side runs to 93 percent and 55 percent. Stevenage's verge parking orders have been rolled out estate by estate, with £70 penalties for parking on grass or footways, and the council says more areas will follow.

What that means for a wash

Your car stays on your drive or in its bay, your washer parks where they can and carries the kit to it. Nothing needs moving, no verge gets used, and if the court is gated or the bay is numbered, the notes on the booking tell your washer where to find it.

What the edge of town does to a car

Open fields, the Weston Road and the A1(M) commute

Great Ashby is the last streets before the farmland, and the air off open fields in a dry spell carries dust that settles on paint and scratches when it is wiped off dry. The lanes out to Weston and Graveley drop mud on sills after rain. Most of the estate commutes, and the run down to junction 8 of the A1(M) or across to the station adds brake dust and motorway film to whatever the fields left.

Winter is the other thing. Hertfordshire's primary gritting routes cover the A and B roads and the bus routes, so Great Ashby Way gets salt and the closes off it do not, which means salt sprayed up from the main road and then left to sit on cars parked in the closes. A wash every few weeks through the winter takes it off before it dulls the finish, and your washer rinses before anything touches the paint.

Who lives here, and the clean that suits

Great Ashby is young families and two car drives. Woodfield ward on the Stevenage side had 5,959 people in 2,254 households at the 2021 Census, with 35 percent of homes detached and 64 percent owner occupied; Chesfield on the North Herts side had 7,405 people in 2,817 households, 70 percent owner occupied. Both are well above the Stevenage average for car ownership and well below it for flats.

• Two cars on the drive: book both and your washer does them in one visit, each with its own wash report.
• The school run car: Deluxe Inside & Out, with the crumbs and the mud vacuumed out.
• The commuter car: Essential Exterior every few weeks against motorway film and winter salt.
• A newer car on a new estate: a ceramic coating keeps it looking new for two years.

More on this: what a ceramic coating actually does and every service and price.