Garden Clearance in Newbury

Four things, in roughly this order of impact.

Access comes first. A garden reached through a 750mm side gate is a wheelbarrow job — every bramble goes out one barrow at a time. The same garden with a driveway wide enough to back a tipper onto is half the labour. Rear access onto a lane, common enough in the older village properties, can halve it again.

Then volume. Green waste is bulky and priced by the load, not the hour. A waist-high garden that has been left three seasons produces two or three loads; one left a decade with self-seeded ash and sycamore in it can produce ten.

Then what is under it. Brambles over lawn is a clearance. Brambles over a collapsed patio, buried rubble, an old pond or a fly-tipped mattress is a clearance plus a dig. We would rather find that on a site visit than on day two.

Then structures. Rotten sheds, failed fence runs, glass greenhouses and any asbestos-cement roofing sheet all change both the method and the disposal route.

Guide prices for 2026 including licensed disposal. Stump grinding, asbestos disposal and skip hire for non-green waste are quoted separately because they vary too much to average.

Everything leaves under licensed waste carriage — green waste to composting, mixed and construction waste to a transfer station, with transfer notes available if you want them. It is worth asking whoever quotes you, because under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 the householder carries a duty of care for their waste. If someone clears your garden cheaply and fly-tips it, the trail leads back to you, not to them, and the fine is yours.

It is the single most common reason a clearance quote comes in suspiciously low.

A decent share of clearance work in this area is neither of the owner's making. Probate properties, houses being prepared for market, gardens that got away from someone who could no longer manage them. Those jobs are worked to the completion date rather than to our diary, and we are used to dealing with executors and agents rather than the person who lives there.

For a sale specifically, clearance is unusually good value. A garden that photographs as a project rather than a garden puts a number in a buyer's head, and it is almost never a smaller number than the clearance costs.