Removals in Epsom, Surrey

Removals Epsom: the kinds of home we move here

Epsom grew in three bursts, and you can still tell them apart from the van. The first was the spa: a mineral spring noticed in 1618 turned a farming village into a resort for London visitors, and the Assembly Rooms on the High Street are a reminder of those years. The second came with the railways. The London, Brighton & South Coast line from West Croydon reached a terminus just east of the town in 1847, the London & South Western Railway built its own station off Waterloo Road in 1859, and Epsom Downs station opened in 1865 for the races. According to the borough’s Adelphi Road appraisal, the population roughly doubled between 1851 and 1891, from about 3,800 to about 7,800, and most of the terraces and villas south and east of the High Street date from those decades. The third burst was the hospitals, which brought thousands of patients and staff to the farmland west of the town from 1888 onwards, and whose sites are now some of the newest housing in the borough.

Epsom and Ewell Borough Council has designated 21 conservation areas, and their appraisals are the best record of what was built where. We use them, along with the address you send, to work out the house type, the stair, the parking and the route in before we price a move. The sections below take the main groups in turn.

The hospital-site estates west of the town

In the 1890s the London County Council bought the Horton Manor estate, west of Epsom, to build hospitals for London’s mentally ill. The council’s Hospitals Cluster appraisal sets out the order: the Manor Hospital opened in 1890 around the old manor house, followed by Horton in 1902, St Ebba’s in 1904 (first called the Ewell Colony), Long Grove, completed in 1907, and finally West Park, which opened in 1923. Building them wrecked the country lanes that served the estate, and Long Grove’s contractor laid a light railway from Ewell station to carry bricks and cement for its 1,100-strong workforce. Horton Lane still runs along the front of the Long Grove site. Most of Horton closed in 1997, and the appraisal records that its main buildings were largely demolished and replaced with flats and houses known as Livingstone Park. Long Grove is now Clarendon Park, where the 1907 clock-tower building, Prospect House, and the two-storey ward ranges either side of it were kept and turned into flats, with new housing laid out roughly on the old hospital’s footprint.

Those estates are what most of our KT19 moves look like. Converted buildings rarely follow the plan of a purpose-built block: entrances, stairs and lifts vary from one range to the next, so we ask rather than assume. The appraisal itself notes the gated layout behind the échelon ranges at Long Grove, the run of mini-roundabouts, and the car parking and garages that now fill the space where the central hospital buildings stood. In practice that means the van cannot always stop by your door. Before we price a move from Clarendon Park, Livingstone Park or one of the other former hospital sites, we ask three things: which building and floor you are in, where visitors are allowed to park, and whether the managing agent wants notice of a removal or a copy of our insurance. Our guide to moving into a block run by a managing agent covers the booking, the lift and the paperwork they tend to ask for.

The railway-era streets south and east of the High Street

The Worple Road conservation area, south-east of the town centre, was developed from the 1860s with a mix of terraced cottages, semis and detached houses, most of them finished by 1895. Worple Road and Ashley Road (once called Eagle Road) are the old routes from the village round St Martin’s Church up to the Downs; Ladbroke Road and St Martin’s Avenue were filled in later, with larger red-brick houses at the end of the century. On the other side of town, Adelphi Road in KT17 runs close to the railway. The council’s appraisal describes a narrow road with cars parked along one side, detached and semi-detached houses at the eastern end and terraces at the western end, and a residents’ car park on the site of a demolished pair of houses.

These are the moves where the street decides the day. Small Victorian cottages like these usually have a narrow hall and a tight stair, and a two-seater sofa or a king-size headboard often has to come through a front window or be taken apart. The appraisal for Worple Road names on-street parking as one of the area’s main problems, and that matches what we see: the van usually needs a planned space rather than whatever is free at 08:00. Before you book, our notes on what to do when furniture will not fit through the door are worth five minutes with a tape measure.

The 1960s Wates houses off Downs Road

Between the town and the racecourse, about a kilometre south-east of the centre, is the Downs Road Estate, a conservation area in its own right. It was built from the late 1950s by Wates, now the Wates Group, to designs by its architect Kenneth Bland, with landscaping by Derek Lovejoy and Partners. The appraisal describes mainly detached houses with some semi-detached pairs, set back behind open, undivided front gardens on a site that rises and falls, with wide grass verges on parts of The Ridings and high yellow-brick walls linking the houses to their garages.

A move here is usually a family house with a full garage and a loft, and the layout shapes the plan. With no front walls or gates, the crew carries across a lawn or a shared path rather than straight from a drive, and where the ground rises or falls there can be steps between the road and the front door. We look at the street view before quoting so the crew size allows for the distance and the levels, and we protect the grass where the route crosses it.

Flats over the shops and behind the High Street

The High Street keeps the look of a Surrey market town, but the town-centre appraisal points out how much sits behind it: shopping centres, offices, blocks of flats, car parks and service yards. A one-way system carries heavy traffic round parts of the centre, and the wide paved area on the north side of the High Street is closed to traffic. If you live in a flat over a shop or in one of the newer blocks behind the High Street, the van will be loading from a service road, a side street or a car park rather than the front door. We work out which one before the day, and time the move away from the busiest hours on the one-way system.

Office removals Epsom: West Street and the business moves

West Street is where the shops give way to offices, in a mix of purpose-built blocks and converted town houses. Business moves here are usually a suite of rooms rather than a whole building, and a converted house means the same narrow stairs as a home move, just with desks and filing cabinets. Our office and commercial removals crews plan these for an evening or a weekend so the stair and the street are clear, and our IT relocation team disconnects the computers and network and sets them up again at the new premises.

Downsizing, storage and the smaller jobs

Plenty of Epsom moves go from a large house to something smaller: a family home off Downs Road to a ground-floor flat in Clarendon Park, or a Worple Road cottage to a flat in town. Our guide to downsizing into a smaller flat deals with the furniture that will not fit. Where a sale and a purchase do not line up, our storage between completion dates holds the contents until you have the keys, and our packing team can box up a house with a full garage and loft the day before. A single wardrobe or a few boxes going to Ewell or Stoneleigh is a job for our man and van service, priced by the load. Epsom itself is outside the London ULEZ, which stops at the Greater London boundary, but any move into London crosses it; our explainer on ULEZ and Congestion Charge costs on a removal sets out what that means, and anything that applies is already in the fixed price.