Mobile tyre fitting
in Sonning Common.

A fitter at your car
in Sonning Common.

Tyre problems here come from the lanes rather than from anything at speed. Flint, hedge trimmings and broken edges on the single track roads between Sonning Common, Chalkhouse Green and Crowsley cut shoulders and let air out slowly, while the B481 Peppard Road funnels everything through the middle of the village. Because addresses split between RG4 and RG9, the postcode is worth reading out in full. Read out whatever is moulded into the tyre wall and the right one is on board.

Drives, bays and car parks.

Driveways carry nearly all of the work here, and most properties can park well clear of the road. Where a car sits on the road instead, a stretch of Peppard Road with a wide enough margin will do, so long as there is room on the flat side and the fitter is not standing in traffic. Church and pub parking is private, so it is not somewhere to send anyone. The unmade tracks and soft verges out towards Crowsley and Trench Green are unusable whatever the weather.

This is a large village with no railway and no public car park, so every job is done at an address. Calls come from the roads either side of Peppard Road, from Gravel Hill at the southern end, and from the settlements it serves: Kidmore End, Rotherfield Peppard, Peppard Common, Gallowstree Common, Tokers Green and Chazey Heath, with Emmer Green and Caversham Park just beyond. Drives tend to be generous around here, which is the most useful fact about the village from a fitter's point of view. The lanes are the opposite. Narrow, banked and often without a verge that would hold a jack, they are somewhere a wheel should never come off, so a car that fails on one should come back to a drive if it can still roll.