Removals in North Finchley N12

Removals North Finchley: from North End to Tally Ho

North End is on record from 1462, one of several hamlets strung around Finchley Common. It stayed small for a long time. The junction of the Great North Road and the 1820s turnpike became Tally Ho Corner, a staging post with stabling for sixteen horses that the Victoria County History of Finchley calls an unfortunate speculation, given up in 1837. Then the railway reached Finchley in 1867, Woodside Park station opened in 1872 and trams arrived in 1905. North End and Woodside grew faster than anywhere else in the parish until 1914. By 1909 the shop fronts along the Great North Road, now the High Road, were continuous.

That order of events is still the best guide to what a crew will find. Building leases, estates and council schemes each produced a different sort of home, sometimes a short walk apart, so we do not price N12 by bedroom count alone. A removals company North Finchley residents can rely on should ask which of the groups below your address falls into, because the stairs, the volume and the parking all change with it.

The villas: Torrington Park and the Friern Park estate

Henry Holden’s Friern Park estate lay east of the Great North Road, and Torrington Park was already being built up by 1872. By 1905 North Finchley was said to be covered with pretty, well-built villas, and the larger houses of those years were put up for professional men and City merchants, mostly in a much embellished Gothic or Tudor manner. Building leases for Dale Grove and Hutton Grove were being granted from 1873.

Houses of this age are the slowest to empty, for reasons that have little to do with the number of bedrooms. Expect big wardrobes, a turn on the half landing, and a loft that may have been boarded or converted. If yours has become a bedroom, the top flight is often narrower and steeper than the main stairs, and we need to know before the day. Our note on sofas and wardrobes that will not clear the landing explains what we do when a piece was assembled in the room it stands in. A walk-through, by video if that suits you, is the quickest way for us to judge all this properly.

Churchfield and the eastern terraces

Not all of N12 was built for merchants. In 1900 the Churchfield estate beside Christ Church was divided for 50 medium-sized houses, and older terraces survive on the eastern side of North Finchley. A smaller house can often be done in a day with one Luton van, but the hall may be the tightest part of the route, so we take the longest pieces out first while the passage is clear. Where a house has been split into a flat on each floor, one building becomes two separate moves with a shared front door. Tell us if the other flat is staying put, and we will keep the hallway passable for them through the morning.

Woodhouse Road: the 1915 council estate

The Woodhouse estate stretched from the Great North Road across into Friern Barnet on both sides of Woodhouse Road. Part of it went for housing as Woodgrange Avenue, on a strip between Woodhouse Road and Summers Lane. Then the Finchley Urban District Council bought 36 acres in 1915, built about 100 houses at once and began another 200 in 1919. With homes of that period, the surprise is rarely the staircase. It is the garden shed and the box room, so we ask about both. If you are leaving a long-held home for somewhere smaller, our piece on cutting a family home down to flat size will help you decide what goes before we arrive with the boxes.

Flats over the High Road and Ballards Lane shops

The commercial strip is where the awkward addresses are. Barnet’s town centre page counts over 39,000 square metres of retail space, alongside the artsdepot and the library, and flats over shops are often reached by a side door or a rear stair. By 1934 the Great North Road and Ballards Lane were being described, unkindly, as a muddle of hoardings, petrol stations and shops. Kingsway was cut through the site of Orchard Lodge in the same year, many blocks of flats went up in the 1930s, and office blocks later rose at the junction of Queensway and the High Road.

For a flat over a shop, the front of the building tells us very little. We need to know where the door is, how many steps there are and whether the van can stand within a sensible distance of that door. Our flat crews would sooner see a photo of the stair than guess, and the checklist on getting a sofa out of a flat over a shop sets out exactly what to send us. In a purpose-built block, ask your managing agent about lift booking and protection before you fix the date.

Businesses and shops moving within N12

Offices around Tally Ho and Queensway, and shops changing unit on the High Road, are usually moved out of hours. Our business removals team starts after the last customer has left, and we plan around the same loading rules that affect a household. If you need somewhere to hold stock or furniture between two dates, secure storage can bridge the gap for a household or a business.

Moving house in N12: what the guide figures cover

These are typical fixed prices for a move starting in North Finchley:

A guide only. A converted loft on Torrington Park or a second-floor flat over the High Road will price differently from a ground-floor home of the same size, so your fixed price follows once we know the floor, the carry and the parking.

Beside North Finchley

Our crews work the whole of N12 and the streets either side of it. These bordering districts each have a page of their own: