What's underneath
Your own front door
UnderneathNothing but your own hallway
A terraced house, a converted ground floor with its own entrance, or anywhere else you open the front door onto your own hallway. Much the easiest of the four, and still not simple, because this is Peckham and the parking is the parking.
What that actually means
Access is genuinely straightforward. Own door, own hall, own stairs, nobody else’s permission and nobody trading underneath. If you have this, most of what makes SE15 difficult does not apply to you.
The parking still does. Much of Peckham and Nunhead sits in a controlled zone, and a bay suspension is frequently needed even for a house — it is just easier to arrange when you have a frontage.
The houses are mostly Victorian and mostly converted at some point. That means original stairs, a turn on the half-landing, and at least one room with a doorway somebody narrowed when they put a wall in.
There is usually more than you think. A whole house has a loft, often a cellar, usually a shed and a garden that has accumulated. The flats above shops do not have any of those, which is why a house move here is a genuinely different size of job.
And the street is narrow. A Victorian terrace street with cars both sides leaves one usable lane, and a removals vehicle occupies it for as long as it is there.
What we do about it
Sort the bay suspension question early, because it still applies
Measure the half-landing turn, which is what actually defeats furniture in these houses
Survey the loft, cellar, shed and garden as separate spaces rather than folding them into rooms
Work promptly, because a narrow street with a van on it belongs to everybody
The thing to do
Do not assume a house means no parking problem. It means an easier one, which is a different thing.
Get a quote
Moving out of a flat your own front door?
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.