Oven cleaning in Topsham

Topsham's historic core is Dutch gabled merchant housing and cottages, a great deal of it listed, laid out along The Strand and the lanes running down to the quay. The kitchens sit in rooms that had other jobs two hundred years ago, and modern appliances have been fitted around beams, uneven floors and openings that cannot be widened.

A range cooker in a wide old fireplace opening is the classic Topsham job. It looks magnificent and it is a half day of work, because a range is several appliances behind one front: two cavities, a grill, and a hob wide enough for five or seven burners with cast iron supports heavy enough to need soaking in batches.

Where a listed building is involved, nothing is fixed, drilled or altered. This is cleaning, it leaves no trace, and the only thing that changes about a protected interior is that it is no longer greasy.

Topsham has more good food per head than a town its size has any right to, and the houses reflect it. Kitchens here get used properly: roasting, frying, baking, all the things that put carbon on an oven roof rather than the reheating that does not.

That changes the sensible interval more than the cooker does. A range in a household that cooks daily wants doing once a year, and left to eighteen months or two it stops being a half day and starts being a full one. The cheapest way to own a range cooker is to clean it before it needs it.

Parking is the practical constraint in Topsham and it is worth settling before a date is agreed. The streets in the old core are narrow, several are effectively single track with parked cars on one side, and a van sitting outside a house on The Strand for two hours is in everyone's way.

Most properties have an arrangement that works, whether that is a courtyard, a permit bay or a spot at the top of the hill with a short walk down. Say which one applies and the slot is planned around it. It is the single most useful sentence in a booking message here.

It is also a town where neighbours notice, in the good sense. More than one booking here has started with somebody watching a van unload next door and asking what was being done, which is a further reason not to leave one blocking a lane for two hours.

Salt-laden air comes up the estuary year round and it reaches everything on the west bank. On a kitchen it shows on the stainless: extractor canopies, splash backs and cooker fronts pick up a dull bloom that ordinary cleaner smears rather than removes, and it sits under the grease rather than on top of it.

Degreasing first and polishing afterwards is the order that works, and it is why a stainless canopy in Topsham comes up looking better than the owner expected. The bloom was never the problem on its own; it was the film of cooking oil holding it in place.