Removals in Stepney E1

Removals company Stepney: four kinds of home around St Dunstan's

The parish church is the reason Stepney exists as a name. St Dunstan and All Saints is Saxon in origin, rebuilt around 952 by St Dunstan himself, and it was the church of a parish that stretched over most of the present borough and part of Hackney before it was split into separate hamlets. Until about 1800 that parish was mostly small settlements and open heath. In the eighteenth century much of the heath near the church was turned into market gardens, and most of it belonged to the Mercers' Company, the City livery company of textile dealers. When Commercial Road was cut through in the first years of the 1800s to carry dock traffic to the City, the Mercers' land north of it became valuable building ground.

A surveyor called George Smith drew up the plan for that land in 1823, and the building was largely finished by 1828. Bombing and post-war clearance later took out much of the wider area, so what is left is a patchwork. The council's appraisal of the York Square conservation area describes the surviving part street by street, and it is the best guide we know to what you will find behind a Stepney front door. These are the four kinds of home we are asked to move most often here, and what each one changes on moving day.

The Mercers' estate round York Square

North of Commercial Road, between Salmon Lane and the churchyard, is a grid of two-storey terraced houses with butterfly roofs hidden behind a front parapet. Barnes Street, Flamborough Street, Bromley Street, Belgrave Street, Aston Street, Matlock Street and York Square itself are lined with them, and many are Grade II listed. The houses are narrow and flat-fronted, and many open straight onto the pavement with no front garden. A few on York Square have an extra mansard storey, some have basements, and most have a single-storey back addition covering half the width of the house, which leaves a narrow side return beside it. These streets carry E14 postcodes and are often called Limehouse, but they were built on Stepney land and run right up to Stepney's church.

The street widths here are generous; it is the houses that are tight. A narrow front means a narrow hall, and the stair in a house this width is narrow too. A two-seater sofa usually goes through; a three-seater, a corner unit or a large fridge-freezer often needs feet and doors off, or a decision before the day. If you are unsure about a piece, our notes on what happens when furniture is wider than the doorway explain the options. Because so many of these houses are listed, the crew pads the doorway, the door frame and the handrail before anything heavy goes past them.

Commercial Road: the bigger houses and the flats over shops

George Smith's plan put the largest houses on Commercial Road itself. They run to three and four storeys, and most now have a shop on the ground floor with flats above. The appraisal singles out 582 to 588 Commercial Road, a Grade II listed group of three-storey houses from the 1820s with Greek Doric columns, standing under the railway bridge by Limehouse station. Further west, the three-storey early nineteenth-century terrace at 495 to 529 Commercial Road still has its iron area railings.

A flat over a shop on this road is usually reached by a side door and a long stair, often with no landing big enough to turn a wardrobe on, so we ask what is upstairs and whether it came up in one piece. The bigger problem is outside. Commercial Road is the A13, a TfL red route, and council parking suspensions do not apply there. We usually load from the nearest side street and carry round the corner, and our Mile End page sets out how loading works on a red route because the A11 there has the same rules.

Arbour Square and the 1930s block

Arbour Square was laid out as a garden enclosure in 1819 on the Mercers' twelve-acre Arbour Field, and by 1830 it was surrounded by three-storey houses. The Borough of Stepney bought the north side in 1921 to build a grand town hall that never went up; the terraces there were pulled down instead and replaced in 1937 by a four- and five-storey block of flats. The west and south sides keep their early houses, and East and West Arbour Streets are lined with two-storey nineteenth-century terraces.

So one small square can mean a stair in a narrow house or a flat several floors up in a block. For a flat, we want the floor, whether there is a lift and its inside measurements, and where the nearest legal place to stop is in relation to the block entrance. Our page on booking lifts, bays and the managing agent for a block of flats covers what to ask before the date is fixed.

Council estates and council-owned terraces

The 1943 County of London Plan marked the land between Commercial Road and the Ratcliffe Highway for rebuilding as part of the Stepney and Poplar Reconstruction Area, and much of the old street pattern was replaced by new estate layouts after the war. More clearance followed from 1969. Even the York Square terraces were bought by the GLC in 1973 and were among the first the council renovated, so a listed Regency house here can be a social tenancy as well as a private one.

Estate flats bring their own parking rules: Tower Hamlets needs a permit for its estate roads and car parks, and on-street visitor vouchers are not valid there. That is set out in full on the Mile End page, and it applies here in the same way. What we need from you is the block name, the floor and whether the lift takes a mattress standing up. If you want to check your own furniture first, our guide to measuring furniture against doors, stairs and lifts shows which three measurements matter.

Homes facing the churchyard

St Dunstan's churchyard was opened for public recreation in 1887 and is now a large green with mature trees, reached by a paved avenue through a gate off White Horse Road. The Grade II listed terrace at 3 to 19 Durham Row and the houses on Stepney High Street look over it. None of the paths through the churchyard is a road, so for these houses the van stops on the street behind the front door and we plan the carry from there.

Stepney sits outside the Congestion Charge zone, and the whole of Greater London is inside the ULEZ, so a move that stays within E1 and E14 pays neither. If the load is going into the City or the West End, our note on how ULEZ and the Congestion Charge apply to a removal van explains how that goes into the price.

Call 020 3983 5199 with the street, the floor and what is going, and we will work out a price from that.

Stepney removal prices

Use these bands as a guide. The figure we confirm is fixed once the stair, the lift and the parking are known.

Guide figures only. A flat over a shop on Commercial Road, where everything is carried in from a side street, usually sits towards the top of its band.

Districts around Stepney

Each of these neighbours has a page of its own: