Removals in White City W12

Removals White City: an estate, a garden suburb and Wood Lane

The 1908 Franco-British Exhibition took up around 200 acres here, with palaces, halls, a stadium and canals, all finished in white stucco. Hammersmith & Fulham's own history of the White City Estate records that it drew more than eight million visitors in its first season, and that the name was borrowed from the Chicago fair. When the halls went, the land was built over in stages, and that is why one W12 postcode can mean a top-floor flat off a balcony deck, a two-storey cottage behind a lawn or a new apartment with a concierge desk. These are the homes we are asked to move most often in White City, and what each one changes on the day.

The White City Estate: blocks of flats on a grid

The London County Council began the estate in the late 1930s, and 23 blocks were finished by the time war broke out; the rest followed afterwards. The London Gardens Trust's inventory describes the result as some 2,037 homes, most of them in five-storey red-brick blocks with balcony access designed in 1934 to 1936, with later tower blocks among them, set out on a regular grid. The council notes that most of the blocks are named after men who served the Empire, many of them in India, while the roads take their names from the exhibition's displays. So an address on the estate is usually a block name and a flat number first, and the street second, and that is the detail we ask for.

Balcony access means the front door opens onto a long open walkway rather than an internal corridor. Everything comes along that deck to the stair or lift, then down to ground level and across to the van, so the length of the walk matters as much as the floor. Not every block on the estate has a lift, and where there is none a top-floor flat is four flights of stairs with every box and every piece of furniture. We plan those moves with more people rather than more hours, take beds and wardrobes apart in the flat, and wrap the bulky pieces before they reach the stairwell. Our guide to moving out of a flat that has no lift sets out what to measure first.

Wormholt: cottage terraces behind the lawns

West of the estate, between Old Oak Common Lane, Steventon Road and Bloemfontein Road, is the Wormholt Estate. The land was bought in 1919, and Hammersmith Borough Council built the core of the estate on garden suburb lines as part of the homes fit for heroes programme, with each section designed by a different architect, and by 1926 there were about 600 houses. The streets are named after plants: Daffodil Street, Foxglove Street, Erica Street, Bryony Road, Sundew Avenue, Pansy Gardens. The council's character profile picks out the communal lawns and verges at the street junctions as the thing that defines the area, and the junction of The Curve and Yew Tree Road is a good example.

For a removal, those lawns are the point. Several terraces sit back from the road behind a shared green, such as Nos. 94 to 112 Bloemfontein Road, so the van stops at the kerb and everything goes along a path across the grass rather than straight in through a front gate. Many of the houses have paired front doors under a single arched porch, which means the neighbour's door is a foot from yours, and some rows have a passage through an arch to the back gardens. Wormholt sits inside the Old Oak and Wormholt conservation area, so the crew boards the paths and protects original doors and porches rather than trusting that a scrape can be put right later. The council's Old Oak and Wormholt conservation area page has the full profile and the boundary map.

Wood Lane: Television Centre and the new towers

On the eastern side of W12, along Wood Lane, the BBC's Television Centre has been turned into flats, offices and a hotel, and the White City Living towers stand on what the Ordnance Survey of 1860 showed as Wood Lane Farm, according to the council's conservation profile. Imperial College's White City campus and Westfield are close by. These buildings work the opposite way to the estate. There is a lift, often a goods lift, a loading bay or basement loading area, and a building manager who wants to know the date, the van size and the crew's names in advance. Some buildings ask for a certificate showing our insurance before they will book the lift.

We contact the building as soon as a date is fixed, book the lift and the loading slot in writing, and send the crew with the floor plan and the time window. If your new home is one of these blocks, our notes on moving into a block of flats with a concierge list what managers usually ask for. A move between the estate and Wood Lane is short on the map but needs both plans: the stairs and the deck at one end, the booked lift and the loading window at the other.

Old Oak Road, the Westway and the way in

The A40 Westway runs along the north edge of White City, and the West Cross Route closes off the east beside Westfield, so most vans reach the area from one of those and turn in along Wood Lane, South Africa Road or Old Oak Road. White City and Wood Lane stations sit next to each other on Wood Lane, and East Acton station sits among the LCC cottages of the Old Oak estate just to the west, which has a page of its own under East Acton. W12 sits well outside the Congestion Charge zone, and the whole of Greater London is inside the ULEZ; our note on why a van crossing into central London can pick up a charge that a W12 move does not covers both schemes.

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

White City removal prices

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

Guide figures only. A top-floor estate flat with no lift, or a Wormholt terrace behind a long lawn path, usually sits towards the top of its band.

Districts around White City

The places that border White City, each with its own page and its own parking rules: