Removals in Hornchurch, from the 1930s avenues to the St Leonards cottages

House removals Hornchurch: the interwar avenues around the old village

Havering’s own 2024 character study picks Hornchurch out as one of the most consistent residential areas in the borough, mainly two storeys, because so much of it went up in one burst between the wars. The St Andrew’s conservation area appraisal dates it street by street. In 1921 there was only a little new semi-detached housing along Station Lane, south of the High Street. By 1939 there were semis and short terraces of four or five houses along Keswick Avenue, Grey Towers Avenue and Fairkytes Avenue, on what had been the southern part of the Langtons grounds, and along the northern stretches of Billet Lane and North Street. For a removal that consistency is useful. Once we have moved one house on Grey Towers Avenue, we know roughly how wide the hall is, where the stair turns and how much the box room really holds on the next one.

What changes from house to house is how much has been kept. Many of these homes have had the same owner for years, and the job is not the three bedrooms but the loft boards, the garage that has not seen a car for a decade and the shed at the end of the garden. We ask about each of those on the phone and, for a full house, look ourselves, because a garage full of things nobody mentioned is how a house move here runs long. If you have time before the date, our guide to decluttering before moving house sets out what to sort first, and anything you keep goes into our house removals price as one load, not a surprise on the day.

Lodge Court, Billet Lane and the conservation areas

Four of Havering’s eleven conservation areas are in and around Hornchurch; the council lists them on its conservation areas page. St Andrew’s takes in the church, the churchyard, Hornchurch Cemetery, The Dell and parts of Upminster Road. Inside it, Lodge Court is a 1920s and 1930s cul-de-sac built on garden-city lines, and the historic buildings on the High Street, Wykeham Cottage at 218 to 220 and the timber-framed buildings at 191 to 197, sit right on the main road. Langtons, north-west of the centre, is mostly the house and gardens, Fairkytes and the Queen’s Theatre, but its appraisal draws a line around the 1930s houses of Billet Lane, Emerson Drive and Cromer Road and asks for their intact front gardens to be protected. On those streets we do not run a trolley across a lawn or a planted bed; we lay boards on the path or carry, and that is built into the time we quote.

St Leonards: Victorian cottage homes off Hornchurch Road

The odd one out in Hornchurch is St Leonards. The St Leonard’s Cottage Homes were built in 1889 on an 80-acre site south of Hornchurch Road, as eleven detached two-storey houses that each held 30 children, with a school, workshops and an infirmary. They were converted to private homes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The houses face each other across The Mall, the old village street, now a central green with an access route along it, part road and part footpath, and no through traffic; vehicles come in from St Leonards Way and the culs-de-sac of Landseer Close and Wallis Close. A converted house built for 30 children is not laid out like a 1930s semi, and the front door may be a walk from where the van can stop, so for St Leonards we always check the carry distance and the stairs before we put a figure on the job.

Bungalows, downsizing and storage between homes

The same character study asks for Hornchurch’s mix of bungalows, terraces, semis and detached houses to be kept, and notes that Havering has an ageing population, mostly retired and living in homes they own. Plenty of our work here is the move from a family house into a bungalow or a flat, where the furniture has to be chosen to fit the new rooms before anything is loaded. Our guide to helping an elderly parent move home covers the planning, and our packing services crew can pack the house over a day or two so the move itself is short. A Hornchurch storage & removals job usually looks like this: what fits in the bungalow goes there on the day, and the rest goes into secure storage until the family has decided what to keep.

Office removals in Hornchurch: High Street units and the service roads behind

Business moves in Hornchurch are mostly small and mostly on the High Street and North Street: shops, takeaways, beauty salons and the odd office upstairs. The character study describes the pattern behind the frontages: shops on the ground floor, mostly flats above, and narrow service yards at the back divided plot by plot, reached from service roads such as Fentiman Way. Where the yard is open and clear, loading from the back keeps the van off the A124 and the bus stops. An upper floor reached by a narrow shared stair is the same job as a flat above a shop, so we measure the stair before we quote. For office removals Hornchurch firms usually want the work done after closing or on a Sunday, and our office removals crews plan around your trading hours.

South Hornchurch and the old airfield

South Hornchurch, towards Rainham, has no page of its own, so we cover it here. Its history is the airfield: RAF Hornchurch, first used as Sutton’s Farm in the First World War, flew through the Battle of Britain and closed in 1962, and the surviving core buildings have been a conservation area since 1989. The housing is a mix of interwar and post-war streets and, in larger patches, the slab blocks of flats that Havering’s study lists for South Hornchurch. In a block we ask whether there is a lift, whether it can be booked for furniture and how far the entrance is from the road, because those three answers decide the crew more than the number of bedrooms.

Call 020 3983 5199 for a fixed price on your Hornchurch house, bungalow, flat or business move.

Hornchurch removals price guide

Typical RM11 and RM12 prices before we have seen the property; once we have, the quote we send you is fixed:

A full garage and loft, a long carry at St Leonards or a third-floor flat with no lift moves a job up the range. Hornchurch is outside the Congestion Charge zone; this is how ULEZ applies to removal vans across Greater London.

Around Hornchurch

South Hornchurch, Ardleigh Green, Squirrels Heath and the streets around Harrow Lodge Park are covered from this page. The neighbouring areas have their own pages: