Pressures for cleanliness in inter-war Tel-Aviv stemmed from the British government, the autonomous Jewish Municipality, local residents and visiting Zionists. This article reconstructs Tel-Aviv's sanitation during the 1920s and 1930s, describes and analyses attempts to clean the urban public space and their limited success. It is argued that the sanitary reality and the issue of cleanliness and squalor in Tel-Aviv, ‘The First Hebrew City’, reflected British colonial policies, Zionist national ideologies, ethnic and social stereotypes.