Removals in Upper Holloway, N19

Removals in Upper Holloway: five kinds of N19 home

The name has moved over the centuries. The Victoria County History of Middlesex describes Upper Holloway as a hamlet at the top of the old high road, near the later Junction Road and the Archway tavern, with Lower Holloway further south. From the 1820s the name was stretched to cover everything north of Camden Road. Today, when someone tells us they are moving out of Upper Holloway, they usually mean the N19 streets around Upper Holloway station: west of Hornsey Road, north of the Nag’s Head and below the ridge at Hornsey Lane. That is the patch this page is about. The streets towards Camden Road and the Holloway Road shops further south have their own page under Holloway, N7.

The ground rises all the way from Holloway Road to Hornsey Lane, and it was built up in stages over more than a century. So the first thing we ask is not how many bedrooms you have but what sort of building you are in, because a Victorian terrace on a slope, a 1920s block round a courtyard and a 1970s maisonette off a footpath are three very different jobs. The sections below go through the five types we see most, in roughly the order they were built.

The 1850s land-society streets

Much of the early building here was done by freehold land societies, which bought fields, laid out roads and sold plots. The county history records that the National Freehold Land Society had a small estate off Hornsey Rise, just north of Hanley Road, that included Lambton Road and Grenville Road, and that the Birkbeck Freehold Land Society laid out an area south of what was then St John’s Road and is now St John’s Way. Building was slow and patchy; many streets started in the 1850s were only finished decades later, so a single road can hold houses of quite different dates and sizes side by side.

By the 1890s, the same history says, Upper Holloway was mainly home to clerks and artisans, and it cites George and Weedon Grossmith’s Mr Pooter, of The Diary of a Nobody, as the type. Houses built for families like his tend to have narrow halls and a single staircase, which sets the limit on what fits. If you are in one of them, or in a flat carved out of one, tell us the floor and whether the stair turns at the top. A wardrobe or a corner sofa that came up in pieces may need to go down the same way, and our notes on measuring furniture against a stair or door before the day show which sizes to send us.

Whitehall Park: one designer, four roads, then a gap of twenty years

The last of the Victorian estates here was Whitehall Park, up the hill towards Hornsey Lane. According to the county history it was designed by R. W. Hill and begun in 1889: Whitehall Park and Gladsmuir Road were finished in 1891, Cressida Road in 1892 and Harberton Road in 1893. The house it was named after was not sold until 1910, when Fitzwarren Avenue was laid out in a crescent around its south side, and many of the houses there were not built until between the wars.

That gives the estate two ages of house within a few minutes’ walk, so we never assume one house is laid out like the next; we ask about front steps, the stair and the floor. Much of it sits on rising ground, so the crew is often carrying uphill from the van or down a flight of front steps with a heavy load. We bring a third person for a full house here more often than on flat ground, and we tell you so in the quote rather than on the morning. Parking on these roads falls in Islington’s Hillrise West zone, which we cover in the parking section below.

Hornsey Rise and the interwar blocks

The first big blocks of flats in this part of N19 went up between the wars. The county history records that the Hornsey Rise estate, between Hazellville Road and Sunnyside Road, was completed in 1928 on the site of the old Alexandra orphanage, as three large three-sided blocks of flats, and that they were modernised around 1980. Nearby it lists Warltersville Mansions (1926), Leyden Mansions (1931) on Warltersville Road, Hillrise Mansions (1932) and Blythe Mansions (1937) near Hornsey Rise.

Many blocks of that age were built with stairs only, and a lift added later can be small. Before we price a move in one, we want to know the floor, whether there is a lift and its inside size, and how far the entrance is from the nearest place a van can stop. A three-sided block can put your stair door at the back of a courtyard, which adds a carry. For a top-floor flat with no lift, our guide to a move up and down several flights with no lift explains how we pace the crew and what to pack differently.

The 1970s estate between Fairbridge Road and St John’s Way

The biggest single change came after 1970. The county history describes how the Greater London Council cleared about 30 acres between Fairbridge Road and St John’s Way in the early 1970s and built more than 1,500 homes there, in a mainly traffic-free layout with open space, keeping a few older buildings such as the school on Duncombe Road. Further up the hill the council added Redwood Court in 1968 and the New Orleans estate in 1972–4, near Hornsey Lane, and new housing went up on the Hazellville Road and Cheverton Road frontages.

A traffic-free estate is pleasant to live on and hard work to move out of. The van can only get as close as the nearest road or estate car park, and from there everything goes along paths, round corners and sometimes up an external stair to a deck or a maisonette door. We ask you for the block name, a photo of the route from the road if you can take one, and whether your front door is at ground level, on a deck or up a stair. Then we price the carry honestly and bring trolleys that cope with kerbs and ramps. Estate parking also works differently, which the parking section covers.

Holloway Road at the station, and the shop flats

Upper Holloway station sits on Holloway Road, which is part of the A1 and a TfL red route. The county history describes how, by the 1890s, small tradesmen were trading on both sides of the road at Upper Holloway as houses were turned into shops, and where a shop building has a flat above it, the way in is usually a side door and a narrow stair. A van cannot simply stop outside on a red route, so for those flats we usually load from the nearest side street and carry round the corner. Our Holloway page explains the red-route rules in more detail.

Up the hill into Haringey and down into Archway

Upper Holloway is an Islington district, but its edges run into two other places with their own rules. At the top of the hill, Hornsey Lane and Crouch Hill lead into Haringey, where a suspension works on a different timetable and price; our Hornsey, N8 page sets out Haringey’s rules. To the west, Junction Road and St John’s Way run towards Archway, where the parking zone runs for much longer each day. A move from one end of N19 to the other can need a different plan at each address, and we write both into one fixed quote.

Small businesses, workshops and shopfronts

The county history notes that in the early 1980s many small workshops were still scattered among the houses wherever 19th-century buildings survived, alongside the shops on Holloway Road, Hornsey Road and Junction Road. Some of that mix survives, and a business move here is usually a shop, a studio or a small office rather than a full floor. We plan those for an evening or a Sunday so the street is quiet and the shop is not closed for a full day. Our office and business removals crews handle desks, stock and fittings, and our IT relocation team takes the computers and network down and sets them up again at the new address.

Packing, storage and the smaller jobs

Not every move here is a whole household. A single sofa going to a friend in Tufnell Park, or a bed and a few boxes from a shared house, is a job for our man and van service, priced by the load. If the end of a tenancy and the start of the next do not line up, storage between two addresses keeps everything safe until you have the keys. For a busy household on a slope, our packing team can box the whole home the day before, so moving day is just loading. Every part of Greater London is inside the ULEZ, and our explainer on ULEZ and Congestion Charge costs for a moving van covers what a route into central London adds; anything that applies to your move is already in the fixed price.