The guide
Student and Room Moves in London with a Man and Van in full
What a room move actually involves
A room move is a bed's worth of belongings: a mattress or not, a desk, boxes, bags, a bike, maybe a small chest of drawers. One mover and a Luton van covers it comfortably, and the driver helps carry rather than watching you do it.
The variable is stairs. A third-floor room in a converted house with no lift is a different job from a ground-floor hall with a loading bay, and it is the honest reason two identical-looking bookings can be quoted differently.
Booking around handover windows
Halls hand over and take back in fixed windows, often 10:00 to 14:00 on a named day, and private landlords increasingly do the same. Book the van inside that window rather than at the edge of it — a slot at 13:30 on a 14:00 deadline has nowhere to go if the traffic is bad.
The two crunch periods in London are mid-to-late September and the last fortnight of June. Vans in those weeks book out three to four weeks ahead, and prices are firmest then, so early booking is a genuine saving rather than a sales line.
- Confirm your exact handover window before booking the van
- Book the earliest slot the window allows, not the last
- Get the new address's parking and floor number to us in advance
- Have everything packed before the crew arrives — waiting is charged
Sharing a van with a housemate
If two of you are moving between the same pair of addresses, one booking with two collections is far cheaper than two bookings. We load in order and unload in order, and you split one hourly bill.
It works best when both rooms are genuinely packed and both new addresses are within a couple of miles of each other. Three or more people is usually the point at which a two-man van and a longer slot beats trying to do it in one run.
Summer storage between tenancies
Plenty of London students need somewhere for boxes between a June tenancy end and a September start. A van job can drop straight into a storage unit, and doing collection and drop-off on one booking avoids paying twice for the same drive.
Pack for storage rather than for a car journey: proper boxes rather than bin bags, nothing perishable, and a clear label per box. Anything you need over summer goes in the bag that travels with you, not into the unit.