Removals in Kew TW9

Removals Kew: which part of TW9, and how far from the kerb

Richmond Council’s own planning guidance for the village splits Kew into fifteen character areas, from the Royal Botanic Gardens to the flats along the river, and a removal changes almost as much from one to the next. A council study of the conservation areas around the station puts it more simply: there are three Kews. The first grew up round the Green and the old river crossing. The second, between the Gardens and the railway, was treated as the north end of Richmond until the 1890s. The third, east of the railway towards the Lower Mortlake Road, was counted as part of Mortlake and was mostly market gardens before the semis went up in the early twentieth century. We use the same split when we price a job, because it predicts the building, the stairs and where the van can stand.

Kew Green: listed fronts and a main road through the middle

The Green has been a conservation area since 1969, one of the first in the borough, and the council’s Kew Green conservation area appraisal (adopted in February 2024) describes it as a triangle of about thirty acres lined with eighteenth and nineteenth-century houses, most of them listed. The larger houses are on the west side, towards the entrance to the Gardens. On the east side the scale drops to terraces of two and three storeys, a four-storey Victorian terrace at 28 to 38 that reads as one mansion, and cottages. Kew Road runs across the Green as the A205 South Circular, and the appraisal says plainly that traffic dominates it. For a removal that means a house facing the main road needs a careful plan for where the van waits. Elsewhere round the Green the question is the front garden: the appraisal describes the western houses as set back behind high walls or deep planted gardens, and the eastern ones behind small gardens or right on the pavement.

Houses at 68 to 110 Kew Green sit below the level of the Green because the approach to Kew Bridge was raised, so check for steps between the pavement and the front door when you send us the address. Ferry Lane, which runs from the Green to the river beside the Herbarium, is narrow and has no pavement at all. For listed interiors we pad door cases and newel posts and never take a door off its hinges; our guide to what you may and may not touch when moving into a listed house covers what changes when the building itself is protected.

The Priory Estate: narrow streets behind the pond

East of the pond, between Mortlake Road and the river, is the grid the appraisal calls the Priory Estate: Priory Road, Gloucester Road, Maze Road, Haverfield Gardens, Bushwood Road and Forest Road, laid out from the 1860s and built up through to the early 1900s. It is the only planned estate in the conservation area, and the appraisal notes that its streets are all quite narrow. Houses are mostly two storeys, red or yellow stock brick, in short terraces and semi-detached pairs. Gloucester Road is a run of cottage-style terraces, and numbers 1 to 37 on it are mirrored pairs with a shared entrance, so two front doors sit side by side and the hall behind each is narrow. Forest Road has houses on its east side only, backing onto the railway.

What that means in practice: a large van parked on one side of Priory Road or Bushwood Road leaves a tight gap for anything passing, so we usually bring a Luton rather than a 7.5-tonne lorry and accept a second run for a big house. The appraisal notes large box dormers on the backs of Bushwood Road and altered roofs on Priory Road, and a dormer usually means a loft room: a whole extra floor of boxes down a narrow top flight. We ask about it at the quote.

Riverside cottages you reach on foot

Between the Priory Estate and the towpath are four groups of small two-storey cottages: Willow Cottages from 1861, Thetis Terrace from 1883, Cambridge Cottages from 1886 and Watcombe Cottages from 1887. The appraisal records that many of them are approached by footpaths rather than a road and have no front garden, that Thetis Terrace and Willow Cottages face the open ground of Westerly Ware instead of a street, and that Watcombe Cottages 11 to 21 face the river with their entrances down at the level of the Thames path. For most of them a van cannot pull up at the door. It stops at the nearest street end and everything is walked along the path, so we add a person to the crew, bring a sack truck for boxes and measure the sofa against the front door and the stair before the day. If you are unsure whether a piece will go in, our page on getting a sofa or wardrobe through a small doorway explains how we test it. All four cottage groups, the odd numbers 1 to 59 on Priory Road and most of Gloucester Road are also covered by an Article 4 Direction, so original doors and windows stay where they are.

Around Kew Gardens station

The railway reached Kew in 1869, after the bridge over the Thames was finished the year before. The station building is Grade II listed, and its footbridge, from about 1912, is listed too. The council’s study of the Kew Road, Kew Gardens and Lawn Crescent conservation areas says almost all the buildings in those three areas date from 1870 to 1890, built as visitors to the Gardens decided to live nearby. Lichfield Road runs from the station to Victoria Gate as an avenue of large detached villas of two and a half storeys, set in large gardens behind continuous walls or railings. Ennerdale Road, added to the conservation area in 2004, has three-storey Victorian and Edwardian houses, some now split into flats. Lawn Crescent, west of Sandycombe Road, is a single estate of about 1900: twenty pairs of red-brick semis round a private central garden.

For these houses the issue is volume rather than access. A five-bedroom villa on Lichfield Road with a cellar and a loft can fill two Lutons, and the council’s guidance resists new parking in front gardens, so the van normally stands in the street rather than on a drive. On the other side of Sandycombe Road, Windsor Road and Alexandra Road are cul-de-sacs of small Victorian terraces, Windsor Road the narrower of the two. A terrace there is a three-person half-day, unless the van has to back in and out of a dead end.

Flats by the river and along Kew Road

Along the river east of the railway, Strand Drive and Melliss Avenue are lined with apartment blocks from this century, between four and seven storeys. Strand Drive is access only, and the terraced houses on Kelsall Mews and Whitcome Mews sit in cul-de-sacs off Townmead Road and Melliss Avenue. Closer to the Gardens there are older blocks: Gloucester Court, an early 1930s courtyard of flats behind two brick archways off Kew Road, and Kenmore Close, four storeys, on Kent Road. For any of them we need the floor, the size of the lift and whether it has to be booked, and where a vehicle may stop inside the development. Our checklist for booking the lift and loading area at a block of flats lists the questions to ask the managing agent.

Office, school and storage moves in Kew

Kew is mostly homes, but there is work here too. Some of the large houses on Kew Road are now private schools, and there are shops and small businesses on Station Parade, along Sandycombe Road and in Mortlake Terrace, the curved parade at the corner of Kew Road and Mortlake Road. We move those with office removals crews in the evening or at a weekend, and for a school we work in the holidays with every crate labelled by room. When a Kew sale and purchase do not line up, we keep the furniture in our secure storage and deliver it when the keys arrive. A packed four-bedroom house is quicker to clear with our packing service booked the day before, which also suits the short morning parking window in most of Kew.

Kew removals price guide

Guide figures before we know the street, the floor and the carry:

Indicative only. A cottage on a footpath, a top-floor flat without a lift, a cellar or loft room, or a Tier 2 suspension on Kew Road will move a job up its range. Kew is inside the London-wide ULEZ and outside the Congestion Charge zone, and neither appears on our quote.

Parts of Kew we cover

Kew in TW9, from the Green and the towpath cottages to the riverside flats, including: