Forklift Hire Canterbury

Hire for Canterbury, from our Chatham centre

Electric, LPG and diesel counterbalance forklifts, reach trucks, powered pallet trucks and stackers are all available on forklift truck hire from £85 a week, and articulated trucks, access platforms and cleaning machines can come too. Ring the Southern Service Centre on 01634 687 668 with the load, the lift height and your dates, and the quote comes from the team that will deliver the machine. The lines are open Monday to Friday from 8am to 5pm, and if a truck stops outside those hours the emergency breakdown callout line is open around the clock.

The centre is at Gladepoint on Gleaming Wood Drive, Lordswood, and Canterbury is about 27 miles away by road: down the M2 to its end at junction 7, on along the A2 and into the city on the A2050. Machines for east Kent are prepared by the Chatham team and travel on our own transport, with the collection arranged when the hire is booked.

Gladepoint was the home of W. R. Nicholls & Sons, long known across the region for forklift hire, and when Acclaim and Nicholls merged the building carried on with the same people. The short-term hire fleet has stayed the centre's strength, which suits a Canterbury business that needs a truck for a refit, a harvest or a busy fortnight rather than all year.

Choosing a forklift for Canterbury sites

Sites around Canterbury tend to fall into three groups: fruit and produce packing, trade and building supply, and storage on the roads out to Thanet and Dover. Electric counterbalance trucks suit packhouses and cold rooms, where the floor is clean and exhaust fumes have no place near food. Diesel counterbalance trucks on pneumatic tyres handle builders' merchants, timber yards and farm hardstanding, and LPG trucks cover work that crosses from yard to shed in one shift.

The larger stores on the industrial parks at Hersden and Whitstable often work to height, which is reach truck work, and where aisles are tight a Flexi articulated truck lifts into racking a counterbalance could not turn in. Powered pallet trucks and pallet stackers look after goods-in, shop stockrooms and unloading a curtain-sider. In the city-centre stockrooms, a pedestrian machine is often the only one that fits through the door.

Access platforms and industrial cleaning machines can join the forklift on one hire, and so can attachments such as side shifts and fork extensions. A quote needs three things from you, the heaviest load, the lift height and the surface underfoot, and it comes back naming the type of machine.

Canterbury's industrial estates, from Wincheap to Hersden

The city's working sites sit on its edges rather than inside the walls. Wincheap Industrial Estate, off the A28 on the south-west side, is trade counters, motor trade and storage, and Vauxhall Road, off Sturry Road to the north-east, has a similar mix. Both are a few minutes from the A2, which makes them the quickest Canterbury drops on the run from Chatham.

Along the A28 towards Thanet, Canterbury Industrial Park and Lakesview at Hersden hold larger units for distribution and manufacturing. North of the city, the John Wilson Business Park at Whitstable and the Eddington and Altira parks at Herne Bay sit off the A299 Thanet Way, with light industry and trade storage. Further east, Discovery Park at Sandwich is laboratory and technology space, where quiet electric equipment on a finished floor is the right fit.

The orchards and packhouses between Canterbury and Faversham work to the season, and the A2 south to Dover carries port traffic and the warehousing that serves it. All of it, from Faversham at junction 7 of the M2 to the Thanet coast, is worked from Chatham by one team on one number.

Servicing, inspections and training on a Canterbury hire

A Canterbury hire includes the upkeep. The mobile engineers based at Chatham carry out forklift servicing and repairs in Canterbury and maintain the hire machines to the same schedule, so a truck kept for a season is serviced without you chasing it. We book the LOLER thorough examination too: at least every twelve months for a truck lifting loads, and every six where it lifts people.

The hire fleet is CFTS accredited. Cold rooms and wet packhouse floors are hard on batteries and tyres, and the parts store at Chatham supplies traction batteries and chargers, tyres and forklift attachments, supplied and fitted. If a hire truck stops, the engineer visit and any replacement are arranged through the same Chatham number.

We run operator training at our centres and on customers' sites; for Canterbury the nearest is our Chatham training centre, which runs novice, refresher and conversion courses. Trucks you own can go on the same engineers' rounds: see forklift servicing in Canterbury.

Hire terms and prices

Hire runs from a single day through to long-term contract hire, from £85 a week. The rate moves with the machine, its lifting capacity and lift height, any attachments, and how long you keep it: longer hires cost less per week. Short-term hire covers a peak, a project or a truck off the road, and emergency hire is there for the day something has gone wrong.

Regular customers can put the machine, its servicing and its statutory inspections together as a contract, in one monthly payment with cover if the truck is off the road. Fleet management extends that across several sites.

If hire stops making sense, we sell new and used machines and take part exchange on your old truck, working or not. All prices are ex VAT.

Shop refits, stock-takes and fitting out a new unit are the jobs that most often need a truck for a few weeks in and around the city. Tell us the start date and roughly how long, and the machine is booked to arrive and leave on those dates.

A Canterbury site that hires instead of buying avoids the capital outlay and leaves servicing and breakdowns with us for the whole hire, and trucks can be added or returned as trade moves; hire against buying, costed.

Your Kent service centre

The Southern Service Centre is one of Acclaim's eight regional service centres and covers the Medway towns and the whole of Kent, west into Surrey and Sussex and north into south east London. Acclaim has been in handling equipment since 1982 and has always been independent, so our advice on which truck to hire starts with the job rather than the badge. We are an exclusive dealer for STILL, Hyundai and Lonking, and we also supply Flexi articulated trucks, Genie access equipment and Kärcher cleaning machinery.

Hire, sales, servicing and training all come from the one Chatham team. A Canterbury business can buy a new or used truck, hire a second for the busy months and have both serviced and examined by the same engineers.