Long Distance Man and Van & Courier

How long-distance pricing works here

Two ladders. Which one you are on depends only on whether the van is carrying your item or your household.

• Within the M25, £55. One item, any London borough to any other, carried in rather than left at the kerb.
• Outside the M25, £1.90 a loaded mile with a £95 minimum. The minimum covers the first 50 loaded miles, so a short hop out to Oxford, Reading, Guildford or Milton Keynes sits on or near it — 55 miles is £105. Past that the meter is simply the mileage: 120 miles to Bristol, 155 to Cardiff, 200 to Manchester. Multiply and you have the price.
• A van load, fixed day rate by band. From £450 to the Midlands, Bristol and Cardiff band, from £600 to the Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool band, both with two movers. Brighton, Scotland and the far South-West are quoted per job because they are a different day shape, and we would rather give you a real number than squeeze you into a band that does not fit.

The add-ons are short and published. A second item from the same pickup going to the same address is £25. A second person for something heavy or awkward — a corner sofa, an American fridge, a wardrobe up three flights — is £45. Waiting is free for the first 20 minutes at each end, then £15 per 15 minutes. The Congestion Charge (£18) is passed through only where an address actually sits inside the zone, and our vans are ULEZ-compliant so there is never a ULEZ line. What genuinely changes a quote is what you did not mention: an extra wardrobe on the landing, a third floor with no lift, or a delivery address a Luton physically cannot reach.

Why the cheap prices online are cheap

Search "long distance courier" and you will find quotes well under ours. They are real prices for a real service — just not this one, and it is worth knowing the difference before you book either.

Almost every cheap headline figure is shared space on a van that is already going that way. A consolidator fills one van with eight or ten jobs and runs it when the van is full and the route makes sense, which is why the quote comes with a multi-day window and a date chosen by the driver rather than by you. Backload auctions work the same way: you are buying capacity that would otherwise travel empty, usually from a remover heading home from a job. Splitting a day's cost between ten customers is exactly why the number is low, and it is genuinely good value if your item can wait.

What you give up is the date, the control and often the lifting. The van goes when it goes. You are dealing with a platform rather than the person driving. The window can be three days wide, and the driver who arrives may quote kerb to kerb, so the sofa gets left on the pavement.

• Use a shared van if the item is not urgent, you can wait a week or two, and somebody is free at both ends whenever it lands.
• Use a dedicated van if it has to move today, there is a completion or tenancy date, the seller wants it gone, the item is fragile or expensive, or there are stairs at either end.

We are not going to beat a shared load on price and we will not pretend to. Our van carries one job, so one customer pays for the day — that is the whole of the difference. What you get for it is today, a fixed number before we set off, and the same person loading and unloading.

The routes we run out of London

These are the destinations we go to most often, each with its own page and its own fixed single-item price. Drive times are one way in normal traffic; the mileage is motorway distance from the M25, and the price is that mileage at £1.90 a loaded mile.

• Birmingham — 125 miles up the M40, about 2 hrs 30, £238. Collected and delivered the same day with room to spare.
• Manchester — 200 miles on the M40 and M6, about 4 hrs, £380. Booked in the morning it lands the same afternoon.
• Leeds — 195 miles up the M1, about 4 hrs, £371, with an early start to miss the worst of it.
• Bristol, Nottingham and Cardiff — 120 to 155 miles, 2 hrs 30 to 3 hrs, £228 to £295.
• Liverpool — 215 miles, about 4 hrs, £409.
• Brighton and the south coast — 60 miles, about 1 hr 30, £114. Short enough to collect and deliver inside the same afternoon.
• Edinburgh and Glasgow — 400 to 410 miles, 7 hrs plus, £760 and £779. Collected today, driven through, delivered next morning.

If your town is not on the list it is almost certainly still covered — anywhere on the UK mainland is, at the same rate. Sheffield, Leicester, Coventry, Northampton, Southampton, Exeter and Newcastle are all regular runs. Give us the two postcodes and the mileage does the rest.

Timing: when we can go and how long it takes

The honest answer to "how soon" is usually today.

• Collected today. Where the diary has a slot we are with you within about two hours of booking. There is nothing to add for that — a dedicated same-day run is the service, not an upgrade on it.
• Delivered today up to about 200 loaded miles. Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester all fit inside one working day if we load in the morning.
• Overnight beyond that. Edinburgh and Glasgow at 400-plus miles are collected today, driven through and delivered next morning, at the same per-mile rate. Nothing changes but the clock.
• A van load is a day. A Midlands run at 2 hrs 30 each way is a comfortable single day; Manchester, Leeds or Liverpool at about 4 hrs each way is a full day and wants an early start. Two hours loading, four driving, ninety minutes unloading is already most of a working day before traffic.
• Seven days a week, 7am to 10pm, weekends included at the same price.

Two practical things move the timing more than the mileage does. First, the loading window at the London end — a permit bay held for you beats forty minutes circling the block, and waiting past the free 20 minutes is £15 per 15. Second, whether anyone is there to take the delivery at the far end; a wasted trip to a locked door is the one thing that turns a fixed price into a second job. Give us a mobile number for whoever is receiving and the driver will call ahead with an arrival window from the road.

Access at the far end — the thing people forget

The collection address is usually well understood, because you are standing in it. The delivery address, 200 miles away, is often a photo on a letting agent's website. That is where long-distance jobs go wrong, and it costs more to fix at the far end than anywhere else.

• Can a Luton get to the door? Low bridges, height barriers on new-build car parks, gated student blocks and narrow terraced streets all rule out the big van. Tell us and we will match a LWB or SWB to the load instead.
• Where does the van stop? If the nearest legal stop is 80 metres away, that is a different job from a driveway. It is still doable — we bring trolleys — it just needs saying first.
• Stairs and lifts. Third floor with no lift is a two-person job for anything larger than a chest of drawers. A second person is £45, and it is far better booked than discovered.
• Doorways and turns. Measure the item and measure the tightest doorway or stairwell turn it has to pass. Length, depth and height in centimetres. Adjectives do not fit through doors.
• Permits. Some councils need a visitor permit or a suspended bay for a van. Worth checking a couple of days ahead at both ends.

Send photos on WhatsApp — the item, the doorway, the street — and we will tell you honestly whether it fits, whether it needs two people, and what that changes about the price, before you commit to anything.

Students, one-bed moves and part-loads

A big share of our long-distance work is not a house move at all. It is one room's worth of things going a long way, usually in September or June.

Student moves. A halls room or a shared-house bedroom — mattress, desk, boxes, bike, a couple of suitcases — fits a small van easily. As a van load it travels at the day rate for the band, so London to Nottingham or Birmingham is from £450 and London to Leeds or Manchester is from £600. If it is genuinely one or two items rather than a room, the per-mile single-item ladder is far cheaper — Nottingham is £247 that way. Our student moves page covers term dates and shared bookings.

One-bed and studio moves. A one-bed flat is normally a single Luton load and a single day to the Midlands, or a full early-start day to the North. Two-bed homes going a long way sometimes want a second day; we will say so when we see the room list, rather than discovering it at 6pm on the motorway. Bigger than that and it is a house removal, quoted separately.

Part-loads. Half a flat — you are taking the bed and the sofa and leaving the rest — is usually priced as a van load, because the van and the day are the cost either way. If the list is genuinely short, ask us to price it both ways and take the lower one: three or four items at the per-mile rate plus £25 an extra item often beats a day rate. See small removals for the local version of the same job.