Removals in Cockfosters

Cockfosters removals: a hamlet, a terminus and a park

For most of its history Cockfosters was a handful of buildings on the road across the Chase. The county history’s chapter on Enfield before 1850 records the name in 1524 and calls it the only hamlet in the western part of Enfield parish before the Chase was enclosed. By 1754 there was a small group of houses, the largest of them Buckskin Hall, later Dacre Lodge, on the East Barnet boundary west of what became Chalk Lane. The Cock inn was there by 1798 and a church from 1839, and in the middle of the nineteenth century the place was still remote.

The same history notes that in 1911 Cockfosters was still described as a charming little village. The change came in 1933, when the Piccadilly line was extended and the station opened on Cockfosters Road, designed by Charles Holden. A shopping parade went up near it, and towards Oakwood station John Laing & Co. began the South Lodge estate after 1935. By 1939 housing covered much of the neighbourhood. The Victorian estate buildings, the interwar streets and the park all survive side by side, and that mix decides how a move here goes.

Estate cottages on Cockfosters Road

The oldest homes still lived in are the Cockfosters Cottages, built along the main road by the Bevan family of Trent Park for their estate workers. Enfield Council’s Trent Park conservation area appraisal dates Nos. 337–345 to about 1800–20, a modest Georgian terrace in red brick; Nos. 325–335 to 1837–40, a Tudor-revival row in yellow stock brick with arched porches, listed grade II; and the terrace of Nos. 305–319, set at right angles to the road, to the 1870s, with unusual triangular dormers. The whole group has been under an Article 4 direction since 2006.

For a removal, these are small houses on a road the appraisal itself calls very busy, and cottages of this age rarely have wide doors or generous stairs. The fronts have picket fences and small gardens, and on the late-Victorian row the front gardens have mostly become gravel hardstanding, which helps if the car can be moved away on the day. We measure the front door and the turn at the top of the stair before the date, take beds and wardrobes apart upstairs rather than on the pavement, and keep the van’s time on the main road as short as possible. Our article on a sofa wider than the cottage door explains the options when something will not go round the turn.

The 1930s streets that followed the trains

Much of Cockfosters was built in the six years after the station opened, between the parade, the South Lodge estate towards Oakwood and the roads behind the cricket ground. Houses of this period are usually family homes with a front drive, a garage or a side passage, a loft and, quite often, an extension at the back. They fill a Luton easily: the garage and loft can hold as much as a bedroom, and a garden shed adds tools, bikes and furniture nobody mentioned on the phone. We ask you to walk us round on a video call so that the loft and garage are counted, because that is where a quote based on bedrooms goes wrong.

Where a drive is long and level enough, we back the van onto it, which keeps the move off the road altogether. Where it slopes, we check where the tail-lift can come down flat before the day rather than on the morning.

Trent Park, the campus and the station car parks

Trent Park is the reason Cockfosters stops where it does. The appraisal records that Middlesex University left its campus around the mansion in 2012, and that much of the park is reached by semi-private roads, with a security cabin at the Snakes Lane entrance. For a move into or out of a home on the former campus, we ask the management company in advance which entrance the van should use, whether it needs a booking and how close it can come to your door.

The next large change is planned on the station car parks. City Hall announced in September 2024 that the government had consented to the land being leased for around 350 car-free homes, 40 per cent of them affordable, two and a half years after Enfield Council granted planning permission; 47 public spaces are to stay, including 12 for Blue Badge holders. No start date had been given at that point. If you are moving into a new block anywhere in EN4, our guide to the first move into a newly built home lists what to ask the developer before the keys arrive.

For the move itself we can bring materials and pack with our packing team, hold furniture in a storage room of your own if completion dates do not line up, and move a single item or a few boxes with our man and van crews.