Leather & Suede Cleaning in Camden

Leather and suede cleaning in Camden often means customised, studded and second-hand jackets, which is a different kind of job from cleaning a plain coat.

The workshop is in Edmonton and the whole borough is on the collection round, NW1 and NW5 through to NW3, N6 and the WC1 end of Bloomsbury. Every piece is looked at by hand first, priced before anything begins, and cleaned at our Edmonton workshop.

Studs, patches and painted backs

A plain leather jacket is straightforward. A Camden jacket often is not, because of everything that has been added to it.

Studs, conchos and hardware. Metal fittings sit proud of the surface and trap dirt in a ring around each one, which is why a studded jacket can look filthy around the shoulders while the flat panels look fine. They also react badly to the wrong products. Plated fittings can dull or spot permanently, and anything already corroding will mark the leather around it if it is wetted.

Sewn patches and glued patches. Sewn ones are usually no trouble. Glued and iron-on patches are the risk, because the adhesive softens and the patch shifts or lifts. Where a patch matters more than the jacket, that is worth saying before the work starts.

Painted and screened backs. Hand-painted leather, screened logos and printed panels come off with solvent, permanently, and there is no putting them back. These panels are worked around rather than through, and the honest position is that a heavily painted jacket has limits on how clean it can get.

Old motorcycle leathers. Heavy hide, armour pockets, perished stretch panels at the shoulders and elbows, zips that have seized. The hide itself is usually the soundest part of the garment. It is the elastic, the stitching and the lining that have aged, so these are often a repair as much as a clean.

Work of that kind goes through leather garment cleaning, with anything structural handled as a repair or alteration alongside it.

Bought at the market, needs work before it is wearable

A jacket picked off a rail here has usually had a long life already, and two things stand between it and being worn.

The first is fit. Leather can be taken in at the sides and the sleeves, and shortened, though there are limits: seams that have been topstitched and edge-finished cannot always be reopened invisibly, and taking a jacket in across the shoulders is a rebuild rather than an alteration. It is worth asking what is possible before buying something two sizes out.

The second is the lining and the smell. A lining that has gone to pieces can be replaced entirely, which is often what makes an old jacket wearable again. Odour is separate work. It is dealt with after the cleaning, using ozone treatment, because the smell is held inside the lining and the interlayers, out of reach of anything done to the outside.

Afghan and shearling coats turn up here more than anywhere else too. They respond well, but they need the skin side and the wool side treating differently, which is what the suede, sheepskin and shearling service is set up for.

Flats above the high street

A lot of the borough lives above a shop, a bar or a kitchen, particularly around Camden Town, Kentish Town Road and Chalk Farm. That has one effect on clothing that people rarely connect to the cause.

Cooking extraction, cellar damp and warm still air all put smell into fabric, and leather and sheepskin hold it better than anything else in a wardrobe. A coat can be visibly clean and still announce where it has been living. Cleaning alone does not shift it, and airing it on a balcony over a busy street does not either. The smell has to be tackled on its own terms.

Storage is the other half of it. Flats above shops are short on space and long on radiators, so coats end up squashed on a rail or dried over a heater. Squashing flattens suede into shiny patches that read as stains, and radiator heat stiffens leather and shrinks linings. A hanger with space either side, away from the heat, prevents more damage than any product will repair.

The Bloomsbury and student end

WC1 and the university streets around Gower Street and Russell Square empty out every summer, and coats get put away in halls, in box rooms and in storage units for months at a time.

The mistake is putting them away as they came off. Body oils, hair products and city grime are what mould and moths feed on, so a coat stored dirty comes back worse than one stored clean, whatever the storage is like. If you are leaving London for the summer, the sensible order is clean it, dry it fully, hang it with air around it, and never seal it in a plastic cover.

Collecting across the borough

Every Camden postcode is on the round:

• NW1 Camden Town, Regent's Park and Somers Town
• NW5 Kentish Town and the Chalk Farm side
• NW3 Belsize Park and the Swiss Cottage end
• N6 Highgate, and the N7 and N19 streets on the Tufnell Park and Dartmouth Park border
• WC1 Bloomsbury, Holborn and King's Cross

No delivery charge applies to a £50 order or anything larger. Anything below that figure carries one £10 charge covering the van both ways, set against the booking rather than each garment. Coming to the unit yourself is free.

Camden is a difficult borough to drive in and a straightforward one to collect from, which is rather the point. If your flat is above a shop or behind a shared street door, give us the buzzer when you book.

Coming to the workshop

We are at Unit F23a, Hastingwood Trading Estate, 35 Harbet Road, London N18 3HU, on weekdays between 9am and 3pm, closed Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays. Call 0208 981 3232 if you want to talk a piece through before you set out.

From Camden it is a cross-town run rather than a straight one: east along Camden Road and Seven Sisters Road, up to the A10 through Tottenham, then across at Angel Road.

Wider coverage, the way an item moves through the workshop and the trade side of what we do are all set out on our North London page. If you are further out, or a van does not suit you, the tracked postal service reaches every UK postcode.