Accident recovery in London.

Make sure everyone is safe. If anyone is injured, or the vehicle is blocking a live carriageway, call 999 before you call anyone else. On a busy London road, getting people away from moving traffic matters more than anything to do with the car.

Then exchange details with the other driver if it is safe to do so, and photograph the vehicles, the damage, the position of both cars and anything relevant nearby — road markings, signage, the junction. In a city these details settle arguments about fault later, and they are much harder to reconstruct once the vehicles have moved.

Then call us. Tell us where you are, what has happened and whether the vehicle can be driven. We will work out what needs to happen from there.

A stationary damaged vehicle in London is rarely just sitting there. It may be on a red route, in a bus lane, on a permit bay, in a controlled parking zone or in the way of a junction — all of which can attract enforcement while you are still dealing with the accident itself.

That is the practical reason to get the vehicle moved rather than leaving it until tomorrow. It is also why we ask early whether the vehicle is driveable: if it is, the answer may simply be to move it somewhere sensible before anything else. If it is not, we arrange recovery.

London recovery is as much about access as about equipment. Multi-storey and underground car parks have height restrictions a conventional recovery truck cannot clear. Mews, estates and narrow residential streets do not always give a tilt-and-slide the room to load. Some locations only realistically work with a van.

This is why we ask where exactly the vehicle is before sending anything. Sending the wrong vehicle to a height-restricted car park wastes an afternoon; sending it to a vehicle that needed a Hiab wastes more than that.

Between Hiab, tilt-and-slide, enclosed transport and van recovery, there is almost always a workable option — but the choice has to be made before someone sets off, not on arrival.

Recovery is the first step, not the whole job. Once the vehicle is off the road it needs somewhere secure to go, the damage needs assessing, and if you cannot get about you may need a replacement vehicle. Where the accident was not your fault, there may be costs that can be recovered as part of a claim.

We handle those stages ourselves rather than passing you between companies, which is the part most people find genuinely useful — one number, and one team that already knows what happened to you.