We start with who has to agree

Why permission, of all things

Because it is the only constraint on a London move that money and effort cannot shift on the day. A load that turns out larger than expected is solved with a bigger vehicle. A long distance is solved with an earlier start. A managing agent who has not replied is solved by waiting, and by nothing else.

Every experienced London mover knows this. Very few sites say it, because it involves admitting that a substantial part of the service is administrative and that some of it depends on people we do not control.

The five parties

The council over the kerb. The freeholder or managing agent over the communal parts, and sometimes over the day itself. The concierge over the goods lift and the loading bay. Your neighbours over goodwill and a clear hallway. And the chain over the hour the keys are released.

A house in an outer borough may involve only the first. A mansion flat in a central one can involve all five. That difference is far larger than the difference between two and four bedrooms, and it is why this site is arranged the way it is.

What we actually do differently

We apply for the suspension rather than telling you to sort it. We send the managing agent our insurance certificate as a matter of course. We survey a second standing point for the vehicle before the day. And we publish the fallback for each refusal instead of keeping it in the office.

We also load early and plan to wait, which is why our start times look earlier than customers expect. A crew waiting is a manageable cost; a crew sent away and recalled is not.

Grouped by access, not by borough

A mansion block in W1 and one in SE10 need the same things. Two houses on the same street may not. So the coverage page groups London by access regime — central permission-heavy, Victorian conversions, managed riverside developments, outer street-door suburbs, protected garden suburbs — rather than pretending a borough boundary tells you anything about a move.

How we quote

We survey, then we write a figure down. A phone call cannot see a stair turn, a lift door opening or a street with no standing, and a figure given without them is a figure that gets revised.

There are no prices on this site and no transit times on the country pages. Both would be guesses presented as information.

What we will say plainly

That some streets cannot be suspended and we will tell you which. That a building can refuse a day and there is no appeal. That a lift can fail and a crew sized for one cannot absorb a stair job, so in blocks with a history we crew for stairs from the outset. And that where a permission has not come back, collecting and holding is better than a move that gets stopped halfway.