Mobile tyre fitting
in Foots Cray.

A fitter at your car
in Foots Cray.

Foots Cray sits where a trunk road crosses a valley, and tyres take punishment from both. The A20 grinds debris into the nearside of anything using the slip roads, while the A211 through the High Street and up Sidcup Hill is all kerbs, side turnings and parked cars. Whichever it was, the vehicle does not have to be driven anywhere. Three things are worth having to hand: the DA14 postcode, the size stamped on the sidewall, and whether any air is left in the tyre.

Drives, bays and car parks.

Foots Cray has no public car park of its own. The nearest council parking is up in Sidcup at Main Road, which rarely matters, because almost every job happens on a drive, in an estate yard or on a quiet turning off North Cray Road. A van can be worked on beside its own unit provided the site is expecting a fitter. What is unusable is the High Street where it pinches in, and any spot on the A224 that would leave the fitter's shoulder out in the traffic.

Two halves ring in. Households on the Foots Cray Estate and the roads off Maidstone Road and Edgington Way, and working vehicles at the Brook Industrial Estate, with more at Crayfields Industrial Park, where hard standing is plentiful and a gate must be cleared first. Driveways handle the domestic side. For a van, a corner of the yard away from the loading doors beats any street around here. The one place a wheel should never come off is the A20 itself, or the roundabout approaches at Crittall's Corner and Ruxley Corner, where traffic funnels in from four directions. Nugent Retail Park is private ground with its own time limits, so the operator's word decides that one. ULEZ covers DA14 around the clock and a parked car owes nothing under it.