Every day, thousands of vans criss-cross Britain partly or completely empty. At the same time, thousands of people stare at a secondhand sofa on Facebook Marketplace or a dining table on eBay and give up on the purchase for one reason: they have no way to get it home.

Porta Delivery, a London-based marketplace founded by Edward Spence and Michael Boulter, sits in the middle of that mismatch. The platform connects customers who need large, awkward items moved — sofas, wardrobes, pianos, full small-scale removals — with a vetted network of independent couriers already travelling with space to spare.

Unlike the traditional man-and-van market, where getting a price means phone calls, surveys and waiting for quotes to trickle in, Porta generates an instant fixed price online. Customers enter what they're moving and where; the platform prices the job in seconds and matches it to a courier, often one already heading in the right direction.

"The big-and-bulky delivery market has been stuck in the phone-and-clipboard era while the rest of e-commerce moved on," said Spence. "If you buy a book, delivery is a solved problem. If you buy a sofa from a private seller forty miles away, you're suddenly project-managing your own logistics operation. We wanted that to be as simple as booking an Uber."

Riding the secondhand furniture boom

Porta's growth has tracked the surge in Britain's re-commerce economy. Roughly ninety per cent of the jobs on the platform are furniture deliveries, driven by marketplaces such as Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Gumtree and Vinterior, where the purchase is easy but the logistics are not.

The remainder are small removals — flats, part-moves and single-room jobs that traditional removal firms are often reluctant to quote for.

The model is asset-light by design. Porta owns no vans and employs no drivers; instead it gives independent couriers a stream of work that fills otherwise empty miles. For SME courier operators, the platform functions as a demand engine — jobs arrive priced, paid and scheduled, with no sales overhead.

"Our couriers are exactly the businesses that keep the country moving — one, two, three vans, working hard, often driving empty legs they can't fill on their own," said Spence. "Every job we route to them is revenue on miles they were probably driving anyway. That's good for their margins, good for the customer's price, and it takes wasted vehicle movements off the road."

What Britain pays to move a sofa

The company has begun publishing data drawn from its platform on what big-and-bulky delivery actually costs between UK cities — a corner of the logistics market where transparent pricing has historically been non-existent.

The figures hold some surprises. Moving a standard large item — a sofa, say — from London to Manchester typically costs around £80, while London to Edinburgh, more than double the distance, comes in at roughly £120. Sending that sofa the length of the country, London to Glasgow, costs about £124 — just 36 pence per mile.

The most counterintuitive finding is that Britain's shortest moves are its most expensive per mile. A hop from Leeds to Bradford — under nine miles — typically costs around £43, or roughly £5 per mile, fourteen times the per-mile rate of a London-to-Scotland run. The pattern holds across the country: Manchester to Liverpool works out at about £1.55 per mile, against 65p per mile for London to Birmingham.

"People assume distance is everything, but most of the cost of moving a sofa is the two ends of the journey — the loading, the carrying, the stairs," said Spence. "The miles in between are the cheap bit. You can send a sofa from London to Glasgow for about the price of a tank of diesel, and that surprises almost everyone."



Bootstrapped and growing

Porta was founded 2 years ago and has grown to nearly two thousand deliveries a month across the UK without external venture funding — a deliberately lean operation built on high service standards, reflected in a 4.8 Trustpilot rating.

The company recently launched Porta Business Solutions, a dedicated service for estate agents, furniture retailers and businesses that regularly need large items moved between locations.

"The next chapter is business customers," said Spence. "An estate agent clearing a property, a vintage furniture retailer delivering to buyers nationwide, an office moving IT equipment between sites — these are all jobs our courier network is perfectly built for, and we can price them instantly in a way nobody else in the market can."

For more information, images or comment, contact Edward Spence at ed@portadelivery.co.uk. Porta Delivery is online at portadelivery.co.uk.