Garage just off St John's Wood High Street NW8

Excellent - a 5-star experience

The booking was easy to do on the JustPark web site; the mapping was good although as with many apps these days, you really need a laptop screen rather than a smartphone screen. However, I cannot give the whole experience any more than 3 stars, and here's why. The garage was advertised with dimensions 5.08 x 2.84 metres (16'8" x 9'4"). My car (S-Max mk1) is 4.8 x 2.15 metres (15'9" x 7') so there should have been no problem. However, there were two "features" of this garage that weren't mentioned in the description. First, as you drive in forwards, in the front left-hand corner there is a buttress sticking out which drastically reduces the effective width if your car needs to use the whole length of the garage. I estimate the reduction in width was about 30-35cm (I didn't have a tape measure to hand so I'm guessing from memory), so parking forwards was immediately off the agenda as the car would have been positioned such that the driver's door couldn't be opened. So I had to reverse in, keeping the car tight up against the side of the garage on the passenger side, which just allowed it to clear the buttress - I'm a very experienced driver so for me this wasn't too much of a problem, but I expect it would be for many drivers. The second "feature" (and much more of a problem for my car) was that the last few feet of the floor at the back of the garage are raised up by a step of about 15cm (6"), it is impossible to drive the car over this step, therefore the last half-metre or more of the garage length cannot be used. This left the front of my car absolutely dead level (to the naked eye) with the drop-down door, but when I operated the door mechanism, it came down on the leading edge of the car and scraped the paint. I could not position the car any further into the garage because of the step; however, I noticed my car was not "dead square" at the front so I drove out and back in so that the front was now absolutely parallel with the front of the garage. When I re-operated the door, I stood on the inside of the garage and could see that the door just cleared the front of the car by literally no more than the width of a cigarette paper. So in conclusion, there is no way the garage should have been listed as 5.08 x 2.84m. The usable dimensions are about 4.8 x 2.2 m. I think the owner should have mentioned these restrictions. The garage is probably OK for small cars, but not for anything larger.