Because the houses are bigger than almost anything else on our patch, a lot of the roads are private rather than adopted, and several of the developments are gated. None of that is difficult — but none of it can be worked out on the doorstep.
Take the scale first. Half the ward is detached, and the village's own neighbourhood plan records that four-bedroom-plus detached houses make up half of the Wentworth Estate and more than nine in ten of Wentworth West — where plots run from one acre to twelve, houses typically exceed 8,000 square feet, and some basements are larger than the ground floor. Wentworth East is smaller in every dimension, at a third of an acre to an acre and generally under 6,000 square feet, but still far above the average house on our round. A clearance at that scale is a sequence of visits, not a van.
Then the roads. The Wentworth Estate was the first estate in the country to be protected by an Act of Parliament, in 1964, and its roads are private — maintained by the Wentworth Estate Roads Committee, which enforces the covenants and its own design code. Three roads sold off in the 1950s, Morella Close, Trotsworth Avenue and Harpesford Avenue, are adopted and sit outside those guidelines, so the road status genuinely changes street by street. Virginia Park and St Ann's are gated and run to their own arrangements, as is Augustus House by the station.
So we ask for the address and the photographs before anything else, and we price by the load — from £130 a quarter load — with the labour and the licensed disposal in the figure. We arrive when we said we would, load, and leave the road clear.