House Clearance in Farnborough

This is Farnborough in the London Borough of Bromley — not the Hampshire one — sitting 13.4 miles from Charing Cross, south of Locksbottom and north of Downe. The Farnborough and Crofton ward recorded 14,632 residents at the 2011 census.

The name comes from Fearnbiorginga, a village among the ferns on the hill, and records go back to 862 when King Ethelbert of Wessex granted 950 acres here. The old village core still reads as a village: narrow frontages, street parking and older stock with tighter stairs than the suburban housing around it.

Most of what surrounds it went up after the Second World War, when suburban development made the village almost contiguous with the London conurbation before Green Belt legislation stopped further spread southwards. Those post-war streets are the straightforward half — driveways, wider doorways, room to turn a van.

There is no station in Farnborough itself; the nearest is Orpington, 1.7 miles away, and only two bus routes serve the area. The Princess Royal University Hospital is nearby, which is a useful landmark when an address is hard to describe, and the roads around it are busiest at shift changes.