Mobile tyre fitting
in Fitzrovia.

A fitter at your car
in Fitzrovia.

Punctures around here are collected elsewhere and discovered in Fitzrovia. A car comes off Tottenham Court Road or Euston Road with a screw in the tread, parks up for the working day, and by the evening the pressure warning is lit. Rolling it around W1T hunting for help wastes the tyre and risks the rim. Photograph the sidewall markings, name the street it is standing on, and the correct tyre is aboard before the van pulls out.

Drives, bays and car parks.

Bays are the working surface. A paid or resident bay with clear space at the back of the car is all it takes to get a jack underneath. Basement parking beneath the office blocks is fine when the building knows a service van is due and somebody has checked the ramp height. Bloomsbury Square Car Park is the nearest roomy public one for anything still driveable. Oxford Street itself and the crossings by Oxford Circus are not places to work.

Two groups ring from this district: residents in the flats around Mortimer Street and Goodge Street, and people whose cars sit all day near the offices towards Great Portland Street and Warren Street. Nearly every kerb in W1T and W1W is a controlled bay, and a fair number are loading bays with a time plate, so the bay you occupy decides whether a jack goes under the car there or you shift one street over. Tottenham Court Road carries buses and cycle traffic and is a poor place to stand a van. Both the ULEZ and the Congestion Charge cover these postcodes, and neither of them touches a vehicle standing in a bay with its wheel off.