What's underneath
Above a shop
UnderneathA business, open while you move
The classic SE15 flat. A narrow street door squeezed between two shopfronts, a steep stair directly off the pavement, and a business underneath that is open and trading while you carry a sofa past it.
What that actually means
The front door is on the pavement, and the pavement is the shop’s frontage. Everything you own goes out through a doorway that a business depends on people being able to walk past, on a street where people are shopping.
The stair is usually steep, usually narrow and usually turns immediately. It was built to get people upstairs, not furniture, and the turn at the bottom is the single thing that most often defeats a sofa in this postcode.
There is frequently no loading at all outside. Rye Lane and the High Street have bus lanes, red route sections and loading restrictions that do not care about your moving day, and the nearest legal standing place can be a street away.
The shop below has a view about all of this, and they are entitled to. Blocking their frontage during trading is a genuine cost to somebody’s business, and the difference between a co-operative morning and a hostile one is usually whether anybody spoke to them first.
Noise travels down. What is a bit of thumping to you is a bit of thumping directly above somebody serving customers.
What we do about it
Work out where the vehicle can legally stand before the day, not on it
Ask you to speak to the business below in advance, and speak to them ourselves if that helps
Measure the turn at the bottom of the stair rather than the width of the door
Work outside the busiest trading period where that is possible and useful to everybody
The thing to do
Talk to the shop. It costs nothing, it is polite, and it converts the one person who can make your day difficult into somebody keeping an eye on your boxes.
Get a quote
Moving out of a flat above a shop?
A shop, a kitchen, a deck, or your own front door — and which street. Those two answers get us most of the way to a price that will not change when we arrive.