CR0 9AA to CR4, 3.4 miles
A ten minute run north west, with the last half mile through a town centre where the cameras decide the approach.
Mitcham sits 3.4 miles from the Prime Waste Services yard on Featherbed Lane, CR0 9AA, a drive of about 10 minutes by car along the A236, signed out of Croydon as Mitcham Road and arriving as Croydon Road. The route carries our grab lorries into CR4 for muck away, clearance loads and aggregate deliveries.
Send the site postcode, what is on the ground and when you need it moved. We will come back with a written quotation. There is no charge for a quote and no obligation to book.
Lines are answered by the people who run the lorries, not a call centre. Same-day collection is often possible but always subject to availability.
The drive is 3.4 miles and about 10 minutes in a car, which makes Croydon to Mitcham one of the shortest journeys on our list. A laden eight-wheeler takes roughly 15 to 20 per cent longer than the same ground covered in a car, so twelve minutes is the honest number to plan around rather than ten. Every timing on this page is typical rather than guaranteed, and on a short hop like this one a single held junction moves the arrival time more than the mileage ever will.
What the short distance buys is flexibility over the slot. A CR4 job does not have to be the first drop of the morning to be safe, because the lorry can be with you within a quarter of an hour of leaving Featherbed Lane and can turn back through Croydon between other work. Same-day collection is often possible but always subject to availability, and on this run it is the diary rather than the driving that decides. What the distance does not buy is a free hand in the town centre, so the final approach is worked out from the door number before the driver pulls off the yard, not read off a screen at a junction.
The last few hundred metres are the part worth thinking about. Coming in on Croydon Road, Mitcham reads as a busy district centre built around a green, and the workable stopping places are fewer than the street widths suggest. Church Road runs inside the Cricket Green Conservation Area and Commonside West bounds it, and on both the footways are tight and the traffic does not slow much for a parked eight-wheeler. Commonside West also runs along the edge of Mitcham Common, 182 hectares of open space on the Merton, Croydon and Sutton boundaries, crossed by Windmill Road.
So give the driver a door number rather than a postcode, keep the frontage in front of the loading point clear of parked cars for the length of a lorry, and bring the material out to where the crane can pick it up, roughly seven and a half metres from where the vehicle stands, vehicle and site conditions permitting. Somebody on site who can answer a phone and stand at the gate saves more minutes than anything that happens on the road. If the address is on the industrial estate rather than one of the conservation area streets, say so at the booking stage, because the two are approached in completely different ways.
CR4
Most of what moves along this route is grab work and muck away, with dig arisings and broken-out hardcore coming back to the yard and aggregate going the other way for a base or a fill. The generators are the CR4 development sites named in Merton’s Local Plan, among them Benedict Wharf on Hallowfield Way and the Wilson Hospital on Cranmer Road, together with the industrial units off Willow Lane and the run of domestic extensions in the streets around Cricket Green. The service pages linked from here set out what each of those jobs involves and what one load will hold.
About 10 minutes by car over 3.4 miles, and nearer twelve for a lorry running at weight, since an eight-wheeler takes roughly 15 to 20 per cent longer than a car. Those are typical figures rather than promises. The variable part is not the A236 itself but the London Road section through the centre, where the box junctions and banned turns hold traffic up at the busier times of day.
Daytime, in practice. The London Lorry Control Scheme closes restricted roads to vehicles over 18 tonnes without permission from 9pm to 7am on weekdays and from Saturday lunchtime until Monday morning, bank holidays included, so CR4 work is planned inside normal working hours. The short run from Featherbed Lane does mean a late morning or early afternoon slot stays realistic even when the call comes in that day.
Along the A236 from Croydon, which leaves town as Mitcham Road and arrives as Croydon Road. From there the last leg depends on the address: London Road for the centre and the streets round Cricket Green, Western Road or Willow Lane for industrial units, and the A216 up towards Streatham Road for the northern end. The driver is given one of those before leaving the depot.
Not reliably, and here that matters more than usual. A CR4 postcode can cover both sides of a road where one side sits behind a banned turn or a no-entry point that a camera watches. A house or unit number lets the route be fixed to the correct kerb before the lorry moves, which is the difference between stopping where you wanted it and going round the block again.
Sources and further reading
Give us the Mitcham street and door number on 07778 541120 and we will fix the slot and the approach.
