High Tide Cleaning Services Contractor

How To Clean a Galley Kitchen With No Window in a Small London Flat?

December 17, 2025 / Mick Resner Two metres wide, four metres long, units down each side, no opening to the outside world.

What makes a windowless galley different from any other kitchen?

Nothing leaves. That is the entire distinction. Cooking throws grease into the air as an aerosol – fine droplets carried on hot, rising, moisture-laden air. In a kitchen with a window over the sink, a decent fraction of that plume goes out through the opening while the rest disperses through the flat.

Where does the grease end up?

Higher and further away than the mess suggests. The hob splashback gets the visible spatter, and people clean it because they can see it. The real deposition happens on the ceiling above and behind the hob, on the underside of the wall cupboards, on the top surfaces of the wall cupboards where nobody looks, and on the extractor housing itself.

What order should you clean a galley in?

Top to bottom, far end to near end, and in one pass, because a galley punishes backtracking more than any other room shape. There is no staging space in a two-metre-wide kitchen. Everything you take off a worktop has to go somewhere, and the somewhere is usually the floor of the corridor outside or a chair dragged in from the living room.

What should you do about the extractor?

Start by finding out which kind you have, because it changes everything and about half the people I ask do not know. A ducted hood pushes air out through a wall or a riser. A recirculating hood pulls air through a grease filter and a charcoal filter and blows it straight back into the room. In a windowless galley it is almost always recirculating, because there is no external wall to duct through.