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The basement, where everything goes up
One storey below the street and nothing about it resembles a ground-floor job. The load leaves upward, the constriction is outside the flat rather than inside it, and the two things that decide the day — the area steps and the gate at the top of them — appear on no floor plan anywhere.
Measure the gate, not the door. It is nearly always the narrowest point on the route.
What to measure in a basement flat
Why upward is different
Carrying down a flight of stairs is controlled falling. Carrying up one is lifting, continuously, with the weight always ahead of you and no help from anything. The same sofa that comes down a flight comfortably can be genuinely difficult going up the same flight, and a basement is nothing but up.
It changes the crew, it changes the sequencing, and it is the reason we treat lower ground as its own storey rather than a variation on the ground floor.
The area steps and the gate
Almost every London basement flat is reached by a short flight down from the pavement into a front area, through a gate at the top. That gate is very often narrower than the steps it guards, narrower than the front door, and narrower than anything else on the route.
It is also frequently immovable, being part of the railings and, in a conservation area, part of the listing. We measure it first because if something will not pass it, nothing else about the job matters.
Light wells and turning room
At the bottom of the steps there is usually a small paved area with a wall on one side and the building on the other. Long rigid items — a bed frame, a bookcase, a tabletop — have to pivot there in order to go up, and the depth of that space is what makes the pivot possible.
Where there is not enough room, items come apart at the bottom and go up in pieces, which is normal and simply needs to be planned rather than discovered.
- Bed frames: almost always dismantled at the foot of the steps.
- Wardrobes: laid flat where the light well allows, otherwise taken apart.
- Sofas: feet off, and frequently on end for the whole flight.
- Tabletops: measured against the gate before anything else.
- Appliances: two people, strapped, upright, with a handrail on at least one side.
Vaults, cellars and the space under the pavement
Many older basement flats have a vault running under the pavement, usually with a low arched ceiling and a doorway lower still. Whatever has been stored there for the past decade has to come out through that doorway and up the same steps as everything else.
Tell us it exists. It is the most consistently forgotten space in London and the one that adds the most unplanned work to a basement move.
LVL −01
Questions about basement and lower ground
- Is a lower-ground flat the same as a basement?
- For our purposes, yes — the defining feature is that the load travels upward to reach the street. Whether the estate agent called it lower ground makes no difference to the steps.
- What if the gate is too narrow?
- Then items come apart, go up on end, or go out through a window where one is available and suitable. We work out which at survey, because all three are slow to arrange on the day.
- Can you take a sofa up the area steps?
- Usually yes, on end, with two people and the feet removed. The limit is the gate and the turning room at the bottom rather than the steps themselves.
- Do you clear the vault?
- Where things are going somewhere — a new address, a buyer, a charity that has accepted them — yes. We hold no waste carrier licence, so anything genuinely for disposal needs a licensed firm.
Send us one measurement
The clear diagonal across the tightest turn on your staircase, corner to corner, with the handrail in place. That single figure answers more questions about a London move than a room-by-room inventory does.