Removals in St John's Wood

Removals St John's Wood: three old estates, three kinds of move

Westminster's own audit of the St John's Wood conservation area calls it the first example of suburban development in inner London. Until the early 1800s this was meadow and hay field. Then the Regent's Park scheme and the Regent's Canal made the land worth building on, and the people who owned it set rules that still decide how a removal goes today. Henry Samuel Eyre held the largest share, about 500 acres between what is now Rossmore Road and Swiss Cottage, and his building leases required gardens and boundary walls at least six feet high. Harrow School owned a strip on the Edgware Road side. The Duke of Portland had a small pocket to the east, around the present High Street, which was built up far more cheaply.

That history is why we ask for the exact address before anything else. A move from a villa on Acacia Road, a mansion flat on Prince Albert Road and a mews house off Abercorn Place can all be two bedrooms on paper, yet they need different vehicles, different crew sizes and a different stopping place. The conservation area was first designated in 1967, so most of what you see from the street is protected, and that includes the walls, gate piers and front paths that a crew has to work around.

House removals St John's Wood: Eyre estate villas behind walls and gates

Across the northern half of the area, on Acacia Road, Avenue Road, Marlborough Place, Springfield Road, Clifton Hill and the eastern part of Carlton Hill, the typical home is a detached or semi-detached villa of two or three storeys over a basement, set back behind a stucco or brick wall with tall gate piers. Many pairs were designed to look like one large house, with each front door recessed on the side wall. For a removal that means three things: a front path that can run a long way from the gate to the door, steps up to a raised ground floor, and a basement with its own narrower stair.

We plan these homes from the gate inwards. The width between the gate piers decides whether a sofa or a wardrobe goes through upright, so we ask you to measure it, along with any internal doors on the route. Where an owner has a paved forecourt behind the wall, a van can sometimes load inside the gates if the opening and the surface allow it, which saves the walk entirely. Where it cannot, two people carry while a third wraps and loads. Our note on moving furniture in and out of a lower ground floor covers the basement side. Many of these homes are large family houses, which suits a full house removals service with a 7.5-tonne lorry and a crew of three or more.

Hamilton Terrace and the Harrow School streets

On the west side, the Harrow School estate followed the Eyre estate's lead, with its first houses at the southern end of Hamilton Terrace by the late 1820s and streets named after the school's governors: Abercorn Place for the Duke of Abercorn, Northwick Terrace for Lord Northwick, Hamilton Terrace for Charles Hamilton, Cunningham Place for the Reverend Cunningham. Hamilton Terrace is the grandest of them. North of St Mark's Church there is more than 40 metres between the building lines, and the detached houses at its northern end have plot frontages of 18 to 20 metres.

Width helps a removal, but it does not shorten the carry. Front gardens here are deep, the houses are tall, and the plain yellow-brick terraces at the southern end, among the oldest in the area, have the narrow stairs of their age. We still ask for the floor count and the largest pieces. The red-brick mansion blocks on Hamilton Terrace, three storeys including an attic, with Dutch gables, are flats with shared entrances, so the managing agent's rules come into it as well.

Terraces where the street narrows

Not all of St John's Wood is villas. The audit lists tight groups of terraced houses, generally on frontages of about 5.5 metres with little or no front garden: Alma Square and Hamilton Gardens, Belgrave Gardens, Boundary Road, and the grander 1860s terraces of Abbey Gardens with their cast-iron balconies on pillars. Alma Square has the least space between building lines of any ordinary street in the area. There are older terraces on St John's Wood Road with curved ground-floor bow windows, the palace-fronted St Ann's Terrace, and the 1870s red-brick Gothic terraces of Hamilton Gardens.

These houses move like central London townhouses: three storeys, often over a basement, two rooms deep, with the stair as the tightest point. A double wardrobe or a large mattress often decides the plan. If you are not sure something will fit up the new stair, our guide to what to do when a piece will not go through the door explains the options before you are standing on the landing with it.

The mews: Rutland Mews, Hamilton Close and the rest

The conservation area has seven mews. Abercorn Close, Langford Close, Rutland Mews, Hamilton Close and Northwick Close are the best preserved, still entered through arched openings and paved in granite setts with drainage channels and stone bollards. A mews house here is usually two storeys of yellow stock brick over old carriage doors, sometimes with an outside stair. The arch is the first thing we check, because it decides whether the van goes in or stays on the main road while the crew wheels everything through on trolleys. Setts are hard on loaded trolleys, so we carry heavy pieces rather than roll them.

Mansion flats on Wellington Road, Circus Road and the High Street

Portland Town, the Duke of Portland's corner between Townshend Road and the old Portland Town Road (now St John's Wood High Street), was built as tightly packed terraces that had become slums by 1900. They were cleared and replaced with the area's first apartment blocks along Avenue Road, Allitsen Road and the lower High Street, including Hanover House of about 1906, five storeys over a basement, and social housing on Allitsen Road from 1904. Further mansion blocks of the Edwardian and inter-war years line Wellington Road, Circus Road, Grove End Road and Prince Albert Road.

A mansion flat is a lift job, a stair job, or both. Older blocks often have a small passenger lift that will not take a sofa standing up, and a porter or managing agent who sets the hours when furniture can come through the entrance hall. We ask you to check those rules as soon as you have a date, and our flat removals crews protect the lift car, the hall floor and the door frames, then keep the loads moving in short runs so the lift goes back to the residents quickly. For many people the move is in the other direction, from a family villa to a smaller flat, and our downsizing guide helps decide what goes and what stays.

Lord's, Abbey Road and the railway under it all

Lord's has been on its present site since 1814 and has been the home of Middlesex County Cricket Club since 1877. Abbey Road, an old route that predates the estates, runs north past Abbey Road Studios, where visitors stop on the zebra crossing outside. Both draw crowds who are not thinking about removal vans. When we book a date we check the Lord's fixture list, and on Abbey Road we load on the side street where the rules allow rather than outside the studios.

Underneath the middle of the area runs the railway tunnel the Metropolitan Railway built into Marylebone in the 1890s, which led to much of Wellington Road being rebuilt. Wellington Road and Finchley Road together are the main traffic route through St John's Wood, and they split it in two. St John's Wood station, on the Jubilee line, sits on Wellington Road where St John's Wood Farm once stood. A move from one side of Wellington Road to the other is short on foot but needs a careful route by road, which we plan before the day.

Removals and storage St John's Wood families use

Westminster's Unitary Development Plan identified St John's Wood as a designated family housing area, and family moves often come with a gap. A sale completes before the purchase, a basement is being dug out, or a house is being refurbished under conservation-area rules that take time to approve. Our storage holds the contents, wrapped and listed, until the new home is ready, and we deliver in one load or room by room. The area has drawn artists since the 19th century and some of their studios survive, so paintings, antiques and pianos come up often; our piano removals team handles uprights and grands, and the guide to packing antiques and artwork for a London move explains the crating we use.

St John's Wood and the ULEZ

St John's Wood is inside the London ULEZ, like the rest of Greater London. The guide to ULEZ and congestion charges for removal vans sets out what applies on which route. Any charge for your journey is already in the fixed price.