Removals in Stoneleigh

Moving out of a 1930s semi in Stoneleigh

Very little in Stoneleigh is older than its railway station. Until the early 1930s this was farmland on the edge of the old Nonsuch estate, crossed by a railway line that had no stop here. The station opened in 1932, and the housing and the shops followed so quickly that, according to the Historic England listing for The Station pub, about 2,080 homes had already been built within half a mile of it by 1934. That listing describes the pub itself, built as the Stoneleigh Hotel on the corner of the Broadway and Kenilworth Road and opened in November 1935, as a flagship pub, built by a London brewery to serve a newly laid-out suburban estate. It is still the best single picture of what Stoneleigh is: one generation of building, finished in a few years, with almost nothing added since apart from small pockets of later infill.

For a removals crew that uniformity is useful. When you tell us your road in KT17 or KT19, we usually already know the shape of the job before we see a photograph: a two-storey semi with a hall, a front room with a bay, a back room that opens to the garden, three bedrooms upstairs with the third one small, a loft hatch on the landing and a drive at the front. What changes from house to house is everything that has been done since. That is where we spend the time on the phone.

What we ask about a Stoneleigh semi before we quote

The loft comes first. Houses of this age usually have a hatch on the landing rather than a fixed stair, and after nine decades many Stoneleigh lofts hold far more than the owners expect: suitcases, Christmas boxes, old curtains, a cot, tins of paint and the boxes from the last move. Whatever is up there has to come down a loft ladder one item at a time, so we price it in rather than discover it. If the loft has been converted into a bedroom, the new staircase is usually narrower and steeper than the main one, and a double bed or a wardrobe up there often has to be taken apart.

The original stair in a 1930s semi turns at a small landing, and the hall below it is not wide. Most modern sofas go through if the feet come off and the crew angles them in the right order; corner sofas, American fridge-freezers and solid oak wardrobes are the items we ask you to measure. Our notes on measuring the big pieces before moving day show what to measure and where. Extended houses change the picture: a side extension built over the old drive or a garage conversion means the van parks further from the front door, and a rear kitchen extension can make the garden route the easier way out for a piano or a range cooker.

Then there is the garage, the shed and the side passage. Where a Stoneleigh semi has a garage at the side or the back, reached down a narrow drive, it is rarely holding a car. Garden furniture, tools, bikes and a second fridge all add van space. If you can, it pays to sort and clear the loft and the garage before we arrive, because every bag that goes to the tip first is a bag the crew does not carry.

The drive and the street

Many front gardens here have been paved over to park one or two cars, and for a move the drive matters more than anything else on the street. If the drive is clear on the day, a 3.5-tonne Luton can usually back on to it or stand across it, and the carry from the van to the door is a few metres. If the cars have to stay on the drive, the van goes on the road outside, and on many Stoneleigh streets the houses are set back behind their front gardens, so the carry is longer. The kerbs often have grass verges between the pavement and the road, and Surrey’s restrictions in this area include no parking on the verge or footway in places, so we do not plan to put the van’s wheels on the grass. Tell us whether you can empty the drive for the morning; it often saves a crew member.

Flats over the Broadway shops and on the main roads

Stoneleigh Broadway runs from the station, a long parade of 1930s shops, many with a flat on the floor above. These are the moves that need the most planning here. The flat entrance is usually a separate door at the front or a stair at the back of the parade, the stair is steep and narrow, and the van cannot stand outside the shop front for long, because the bays on the Broadway are short-stay. Our guide to getting furniture down from a flat above a shop covers the stair and the timing, and the parking section below explains how we handle the Broadway bays. Homes facing the main roads, the A240 Kingston Road on the west side and the A24 by Nonsuch Park on the east, are a different problem: neither is a place to stop a lorry, so we load from the nearest side road or the service road where there is one.

Office removals Stoneleigh: shops, practices and home offices

Business moves in Stoneleigh are small and local. They tend to be a shop unit or a first-floor office on the Broadway, a practice or a studio near the station, or a home office in a converted box room. Our commercial moving crews work after the shop shuts or on a Sunday, when the short-stay bays are quieter and the stair to the upper floor is clear, and our IT relocation team can disconnect and reconnect the computers, printers and network at the other end. If you are moving a business into smaller premises, our article on moving into a smaller office deals with what to keep, store or sell.

Moving on from the family house

A lot of Stoneleigh moves are people who bought a semi here decades ago and are now going somewhere smaller, or helping a parent do it. That kind of move is mostly sorting: deciding what goes to the new place, what goes to family, what goes to charity and what goes to the tip. We can split one house into several drops on the same day. Our packing service can box up the china, the books and the kitchen the day before, our storage between dates holds anything that is not ready to go, and for one or two pieces going to a son or daughter round the corner, our man and van service is priced by the load. Stoneleigh is in Surrey, outside Greater London, so the ULEZ does not apply to our vans here, but Worcester Park and North Cheam a short drive north and east are inside it; our explainer on what the ULEZ and the Congestion Charge mean for a removal covers that, and any charge is already in the quoted price.