Garden Clearance in Wolverton

The civil parish of Wolverton and Greenleys recorded 12,492 residents at the 2011 census. It sits in the north-west of the city beside the West Coast Main Line, the Grand Union Canal and the Great Ouse.

It is a planned railway town and it still reads as one. Established in 1838 as the site of the locomotive repair shop at the midpoint of the London and Birmingham Railway, the company had built some 200 houses for its workers by 1844, along with schools, a church and a market. The works went on to build and maintain carriages, including the Royal Train.

Those worker terraces are laid out on a tight grid: narrow frontages, no driveways, on-street parking, and stairs built for the furniture of the 1840s. That is usually what decides how a wardrobe or sofa actually comes out. If there is rear access from a back lane, that is worth telling us.

Old Wolverton is a separate place entirely — the medieval settlement, largely deserted after the Longville family enclosed the strip fields into small closes, which cut the population sharply by the seventeenth century. Stratford Road is the main route through, with Grafton Street (V6) and Monks Way (H3, A422) connecting to the rest of the grid.