Cambridge is right to room-shame dirty students – I should know, as I was a uni cleaner

Students are a revolting bunch. That much we know. But at Cambridge university’s Fitzwilliam College, housekeepers – housekeepers! – have had enough and gone rogue over the state of the digs they are expected to make habitable. And, as someone who has worked as a cleaner, I am here for it.

Some properly filthy photographs taken by cleaning staff have been doing the rounds as an illustration of “what housekeeping do not want to see on their weekly visits”.

The shared kitchens are said to have become a particular flashpoint, which I presume means that the mass of dirty plates and pans competing for sink space needs killing with fire. In addition, one student’s room had become infested with slugs, not, one assumes, because it was overburdened with juicy houseplants.

It is peak 2024 that the hundreds of undergrads and postgrads stewing in foetor of their own making were more upset at their privacy having been invaded rather than the prospect of their rooms being invaded by sugar ants.

I’m Team Cleaner all the way. I come from a family of chars and drudges – my great-grandmother cleaned at the infamous Mayfair hostess club, Churchill’s on Bond Street – and for two summers, I earned my keep wiping up after students in east London.

Sounds grim, but I count myself lucky. I didn’t get to see the worst of how other students live day to day – by the time I picked up a broom on my first day, the dirty tykes had cleared off at the end of the academic year. I was part of a live-in team that kept the place habitable over the summer, for the international language students who stayed in between terms.

Mostly, it was a case of lugging out any clutter left behind at the end of tenancies. (Someone exiting in a hurry forgot to empty their drawer of T-shirts, which kept me going during my festival-going Britpop years.) Then it was a case of assessing the damage and making the place spruce.

You can imagine the general vibe, like something out of a particularly evocative Pulp song. Sticky-to-the-touch fixtures and fittings. Grubby floors. Curious smears on vanity mirrors. Tin ashtrays, half-inched from the local pub and erupting with stubbed-out butts, left on a warm windowsill. Bathrooms that really needed fumigating rather than a quick flick round with a bleachy cloth.

As my colleague Helen Coffey wrote here earlier this week, give young men a single room of their own (sorry, Virginia Woolf…), and it quickly becomes a pit. On campus, the population is itinerant and focussed on bigger things than interior design and its upkeep – either intellectual study, or avoiding it at all costs – so things can get messy. In my experience of cleaning up after students, the hardest thing was plugholes. Once you’ve dealt with the damp clump in the sink and shower, there’ll always be a long black that turns up from nowhere, across a mirror or on a bedspread, to ruin your handiwork.

My time as a cleaner was well before the indoor smoking ban or the invention of Febreze, so a general nicotine fug haunted the corridors, where it mixed with that central-casting odour of overcrowding and under-ventilation. If I ever opened up a room and came across anything that might pass for a dirty protest – and, frankly, it was the least that those single-bed cells deserved, in 1960s tower blocks overlooking a six-lane trunk road – I’ve blocked it out.

Those summers spent cleaning help me through university, and gave me a chance to put into play all those little techniques I’d not realised I’d picked up at the knee of my mum, who had been a cleaner at my local primary school, and took me with her on her shifts. Somehow, I’d osmosed how to perform big swoops with a wet mop, and best practice for polishing a canteen floor.

In this internet age, where all human knowledge lives forever online, there are no excuses for mucky-puppery, even from students. As it’s April, I’ve been busy spring cleaning at home. I wanted to add Shake n’ Vac to my online Waitrose shop – don’t judge, I’ve got a Laura Ashley rug that needs its freshness back… – but they don’t sell it. I couldn’t find it on any shop shelf, either. But YouTube has the answer: sprinkle your rug with bicarbonate of soda, leave overnight, then vacuum off in the morning.

If Fitzwilliam’s housekeepers could be encouraged to now post their dirty pictures for all to see, I’m sure internet users would have top tips about how to make short work of the godawful mess.