Four flights down and out — E5 clearances priced by the load, carried by us
What a load costs in Clapton
Free · sized down if the pile is smaller than you thought
What the council will and will not take changes at the borough boundary, and so does which tip will let a van through the gate. We work to whichever set of rules your address falls under.
A clearance in E5 is measured in flights rather than in bin bags. The houses along Upper and Lower Clapton Road went up three and four storeys, a good number over a semi-basement, and almost all of them have since been divided one flat to a floor. Whatever is coming out is therefore coming down a staircase that was built generously at the bottom and meanly at the top: it narrows, it steepens, and the turn on the top landing is where a wardrobe stops rather than the front door. Two people and a barrow solve that. One person with a car does not, and the number of trips — not the mileage — is what makes the day long.
The council's routes have the same shape here as across the rest of the borough, which is to say they are thin. Hackney has no recycling centre inside its boundary, so the tip is in Islington, Waltham Forest or Haringey depending on which way you drive, and any of them will stop a van at the gate without a booking made the day before. There is a cap on how often a household may bring one at all, counted across the financial year that runs from April. The kerbside collection is a paid booking, capped by item count, and it wants everything standing on the pavement before six in the morning — which, for a top-floor flat above Clapton Pond, is the entire job done before the lorry has left the depot.
The ground outside does its own share. The eastern side of E5 drops away to the river, the marshes and Millfields; the other end lifts towards Stamford Hill. A single road can therefore be level where it starts and a slope where it finishes, which decides the carry as much as the floor number does. Around the Pond and Chatsworth Road the houses sit behind railings with several steps up to a raised door, which adds a short lift to the start of every single trip. We ask which floor, which end of the street and how many steps before the door, and then price the load size accordingly. Nothing about that changes on the morning.
Borough waste rules here were read from the council's own pages on 9 September 2026. They do change — the council's page is always the last word.
Moving a whole flat or a whole house in Clapton? House removals in Clapton
Every load out of Clapton is tipped at a licensed transfer station and sorted there for recycling, energy recovery or a specialist stream. We keep the waste transfer note for each one and will send you a copy for your records.
Three answers and a date. Nobody has to come and look at the pile first.
Choose whichever load size is nearest to what you are looking at. Under-estimate and over-estimate are both fixable at the door.
Loft, third floor, back garden or garage. It is the carry that makes a clearance long, so it belongs in the price rather than in an argument afterwards.
We sort it, sweep the space and take the lot to a permitted facility. What is left behind is an empty room, not a bagged heap by the bins.
Two as standard, and a third or fourth can be added when you book if the flat is high, full or both. Stairs like these allow one carrier with one thing on them at any moment, so extra hands shorten the morning far more here than in a ground-floor flat.
Sometimes. Anything built in the room it stands in was never carried up past the turn below it, and we would rather take it apart on the landing than mark your banister proving a point. Tell us what was assembled upstairs and we will bring the tools for it.
The load size sets the price, and the floor and the lift are the other things we ask about, so a short carry from a garden flat is not the same job as four flights and it is not quoted as though it were. Both are worked out before you book, on screen.
Yes. Mattresses and upholstered furniture are separated at the transfer station under the rules for persistent organic pollutants rather than sent to landfill, and fridges and freezers go to a site licensed to degas them. Neither needs wrapping before we arrive.
We do, regularly, and we will work at whatever pace suits you. Tell us what must be kept and set it aside in one room; everything else is sorted, loaded and taken away in a single visit rather than dragged out across a fortnight.
Pick the load size, give us the E5 address and the floor, and the whole thing can be gone this week.
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