Removals in Ashford

Removals Ashford: how a Middlesex village became a railway town

Ashford takes its name from the River Ash, which crosses the western corner of the old parish, and from the ford where the road from Staines and Laleham crossed it. A stone bridge replaced the ford in 1789, built by the Hampton and Staines Turnpike Trust, and the name Ford Bridge survives. For centuries the manor belonged to Westminster Abbey, and the parish was a flat stretch of gravel farmland between the London road to the north and the Staines to Kingston road to the south.

The county history entry for Ashford, written for the Victoria County History in 1911, caught the moment that changed. Until a few years earlier, it says, the parish had been almost entirely rural. Now the old village street was being rebuilt with modern shops, and an entirely new town had grown up round the station to house working families. East of the old village stood a group of private houses in their own gardens, and to the south fields and woodland still covered what had been Ashford Common. That account is more than a hundred years old, and much of TW15 has been built since, but the pattern it describes still decides how a moving day goes here.

The station town and the residential roads

The streets round Ashford station are where a typical TW15 removal starts: a semi or a terrace with a short front garden, a loft, often a garage or a converted one, and a road where residents park on both sides. On those roads the question is not a permit zone but simply whether a gap long enough for a Luton will be free at 08:00. Where the house has a drive, we load from it. Where it does not, we ask you to have a word with the neighbours the day before, not on the morning.

Family houses here tend to hold a lot. Lofts reached by a pull-down ladder, garages used as a second store room and garden sheds full of tools add a surprising amount to a move, so we ask about them when we quote rather than discover them at noon. Our guide to choosing the right van for the size of your home explains why a three-bedroom semi with a full loft and garage can need more space than a four-bedroom flat.

Church Road and the new blocks north of it

Spelthorne’s design code describes the town centre as a long line of shops along Church Road, with the station at its north-eastern end where the centre spreads round the mini-roundabout joining Woodthorpe Road, Station Approach and Clarendon Road. Most of the buildings are two or three storeys, with shops below and rooms above. Church Road is wide, between 16 and 25 metres, and in its widest stretches has a parallel parking lane; Woodthorpe Road is about 15 metres with parking along it.

The same document records that the centre has spread northwards with recent mixed-use, high-density housing, built as much larger blocks than the old terraces. For a flat in one of those blocks, the questions are the lift, the loading point and how far apart they are, and we put them to the managing agent before we fix a time. Our checklist for a move into or out of a purpose-built block covers what to ask. Shops and small offices along Church Road we move after closing, and our notes on relocating a shop without losing trading days explain how the stock and fittings are listed first.

Older buildings: St Matthew’s, the Welsh School and Ashford Common

The parish church of St Matthew, built in 1858, stands on the site of at least two earlier churches beside what was the main street of the old village, and the war memorial is close by. Further west on Church Road is the Welsh School of 1857, designed by Henry Clutton in Gothic style in ragstone with Bath stone dressings, a clock and belfry over its centre and the Prince of Wales’ feathers above the door. Both are listed at Grade II, together with the school’s chapel, its lodge railings and gates, St Hilda’s church and the Roman Catholic church of St Michael.

To the south, Ashford Common was, in 1911, a hamlet of an inn, a smithy and a few cottages round the crossroads where the roads from Staines, Kingston, Littleton and Feltham meet, with streets of workmen’s houses already being laid out a few hundred yards west. It is now a district in its own right, and we cover it from this page because it has no page of its own.

If you would rather not pack, our packing crew can box up the kitchen, the books and the loft the day before. If the sale completes before the purchase, we can hold everything in secure containerised storage until the keys arrive, and for a sofa, a bed or a handful of boxes our man and van option costs less than a full crew.