Removals in Mill Hill NW7

Three Mill Hills, three different moving days

When someone in NW7 asks us for a quote, the first thing we want to know is which part of Mill Hill the house is in, because the answer changes the vehicle, the crew and the start time. A cottage on The Ridgeway and a semi off the Broadway are less than two miles apart, but one may have no drive, no pavement and a stream of school traffic outside, and the other a wide road and a garage full of thirty years of storage. The new flats at Mill Hill East need something else again: a slot in a loading bay and a lift booked through a managing agent. Below is how we approach each one.

Removals Mill Hill Village and The Ridgeway

Barnet’s Mill Hill Conservation Area appraisal (adopted April 2008) describes around 260 houses strung out for a mile along the high ground, mostly brick and weatherboard cottages of the rural Middlesex kind, set among much larger institutional buildings. The houses grew up on the old roadside wastes that the manor of Hendon sold off, which is why so many of them sit right at the edge of the road behind a shallow front garden and a low wall or a white picket fence. There is often nowhere to put a van except the road itself. At the eastern end, the village proper clusters round the pond and the two greens at the top of Milespit Hill: mainly two-storey late Victorian brick, with older listed groups such as Nicoll’s Almshouses, The Welches and Hillside Cottages. Cottages of this age often have narrow, turning staircases, so beds, wardrobes and sofas are measured and, where needed, taken apart before move day rather than wrestled with on the landing.

The ground matters as much as the houses. The appraisal notes that the land falls steeply down Highwood Hill, climbs sharply again at Holcombe Hill and drops away down Milespit Hill at the eastern end, while The Ridgeway itself is fairly level. On those slopes the pavements thin out: they disappear altogether at Holcombe Hill and run on one side only along Highwood Hill. When we survey a cottage on one of the hills, we look at where the van can stand safely with its tail-lift down, and whether the crew will be carrying uphill on a narrow path, because that decides whether the job needs two people or three.

Wills Grove, Winterstoke Gardens and the converted school houses

Two corners of the conservation area catch people out. Wills Grove is a private road with a shared surface and restricted car use; several of its big houses were boarding and staff houses for Mill Hill School, and some have since been sold as private houses and apartments. Winterstoke Gardens, at the southern end of Hammers Lane, is a row of large Arts and Crafts semis set back behind heavy planting, reached along a narrow path that is for pedestrians only. In both places the van cannot pull up at the front door. We check access with the owners or the managing agent first, plan a longer carry with sack trucks and furniture dollies, and price the extra time into the quote so it is not a surprise on the day.

The Broadway and the 1930s roads around it

Mill Hill Broadway is younger than it looks. Barnet’s local history notes that the lower end of Lawrence Street was renamed the Broadway in the 1910s once the first shops opened, that roads such as Lyndhurst Avenue and Woodcroft Avenue were laid out on the old Bunns estate, and that the opening of the Barnet–Watford bypass in October 1928 is what brought the large-scale suburban building that followed. Most of the houses we move out of on this side of NW7 are from those decades: semis and detached houses with a hall, a loft, a side passage and very often a garage that has become the family store. Those moves are mostly about volume. We ask about the loft, the garage, the shed and any garden furniture at the quote stage, because underestimating them is how a move turns into a second trip. Above the shops on the Broadway itself there are flats reached by a door at street level and a single flight of stairs; for those, our notes on leaving a flat on a shopping parade cover the things to agree with the landlord and the shop below.

Office removals Mill Hill: the Broadway and the station end

The business moves we are asked about here are mostly small: a practice, an accountant or an estate agent in the offices above the Broadway shops. They are best done outside trading hours, so we often load on a Saturday evening or a Sunday, when the Broadway service roads are quieter. We take an inventory with you, label every desk and crate by room, and work to a week-by-week plan for a small office move so the phones and the server are the last things out and the first things in.

Mill Hill East and Millbrook Park

Mill Hill East only got that name in 1935; before that the area was known as Bittacy Hill. The older houses here are modest: Barnet’s history records cottages built for railway and gas workers along Murray Road, Station Villas and the south side of Saunders Lane, council maisonettes north of Saunders Lane from about 1932, and houses put up as married quarters for the barracks in the 1960s and 1970s. The barracks and the old council depot are now Millbrook Park. Barnet’s Mill Hill East regeneration page describes more than 40 hectares being turned into a new suburb of 2,240 homes, with serviced plots sold to different builders who each obtain their own detailed consent. In practice that means the blocks and streets are run by different developers and managing agents, each with its own rules on lift bookings, loading bays and working hours. We ask for the building’s move-in pack before we confirm a date. If you are buying new, our checklist on taking over a new-build home is worth reading before completion.

Call 020 3983 5199 and tell us the street; we will tell you which of these three moves you have.

What a Mill Hill move costs

Guide prices before we have seen the property. Your fixed figure follows the survey:

Guide figures only. A Ridgeway cottage with a long carry, or a house with a full loft and garage, sits higher in its band; a Millbrook Park flat with a booked lift often sits lower. Any Barnet parking charge is quoted separately, at cost.

Around Mill Hill

We also cover Highwood Hill and The Hale, plus the neighbouring districts that have their own pages: