Fragile things rarely break the way people imagine, in one dramatic drop. They break quietly, from vibration and small movements repeated for hours inside a box that was packed with too much faith and too little paper. The good news is that packing against vibration is a learnable skill with a few firm rules, and a box packed to those rules will ride a van, a hub transfer and a second van without a chip.
Why things actually break
Your boxes make a real journey: carried to the van, driven to our Oxfordshire hub, unloaded, sorted onto the destination run, reloaded, driven again, delivered. That is hours of road vibration and at least six handlings. Three forces do the damage. Contents shifting inside the box. Boxes pressing on each other in a stack. And flex, where a half empty box slowly crushes and lets everything inside rearrange itself.
Every technique below defends against one of those three.
The void rule
This is the rule that matters most: a finished box contains no empty space. Not at the bottom, not at the sides, not at the top. Every gap is filled with scrunched paper, so that nothing inside can move even a centimetre, and the lid closes flat under light pressure without bulging.
Scrunched paper, not flat sheets. Flat sheets of paper or bubble wrap laid over the top do almost nothing, because protection comes from crumple zones, not coverage. Scrunch each sheet into a loose ball and pack the balls in firmly.
Then apply the shake test. Lift the sealed box and tilt it gently each way. If you hear or feel anything move, open it and fill the gap. A silent box is a safe box.
Glasses
Wrap every glass individually in paper, stuffing paper inside the bowl first, then rolling. Never nest unwrapped glasses inside each other, because that is how whole sets die together. Pack glasses standing upright, the way they sit on a shelf, since glass is strongest along its vertical axis. Wine glasses get an extra wind of paper around the stem before the main wrap. Use a small or medium double wall box, build a thick crumpled base layer first, and put a cell divider in if you have one.
Plates and bowls
Plates travel on edge, standing vertically like records, never stacked flat. A flat stack concentrates road vibration into the bottom plate until it cracks. Paper between every plate, a thick paper base beneath, and a small box only, because china is heavy and this box will reach weight before it reaches volume. Bowls can nest in threes with a full sheet of paper between each, then get wrapped as a bundle and placed open side down.
Pictures, mirrors and glass
Small framed pictures wrap in paper, then travel vertically in a box, slotted like books with cardboard between frames. Larger pieces get corner protectors, cut from cardboard if you have none, then a full cardboard sheet over the glass face, then a wrap of bubble or a blanket. A strip of low tack masking tape in an X across mirror glass will not stop a break but keeps fragments together if the worst happens.
Mirrors and large glass always travel upright, never flat, and never with anything resting on them. Anything too big to box safely, like a full length mirror or a glass topped table, should travel as a furniture item at £45, which brings a two person crew on the Assisted tier and keeps it in careful hands at every lift.
Lamps, ceramics and awkward shapes
Take lamps apart: bulb out and discarded or boxed separately, shade off, flex coiled and taped to the base. Wrap the base heavily and box it with the void rule. Lampshades are crushable rather than breakable, so they get a large box with light things, never packed under weight. Vases and ceramics get stuffed with paper inside before wrapping, because a supported hollow is far stronger than an empty one, then stand upright in a snug box.
Boxes, labels and weight
Fragile loads need double wall boxes, always. Tape the bottom seam with three overlapping strips. Keep fragile boxes light, ideally under 15 kg and never near the 30 kg piece limit, because a light box is handled more gently by everyone who touches it and crushes nothing if stacking goes wrong.
Label four sides, not just the top: FRAGILE, THIS WAY UP, plus your name, mobile number and the destination postcode. A box labelled on the top only becomes anonymous the moment another box sits on it.
Fragile boxes count as ordinary pieces for pricing, at £15 each for pieces five to ten and £12 from the eleventh onwards, and a Kerbside collection from £199 suits them fine when they are packed to the standard above.
What to keep with you
Some things should never travel in any van, however well packed: passports and documents, jewellery, the hard drive with the only copy of your photos, and the one heirloom whose loss money could not fix. Those go in the bag you carry yourself. Everything else, wrapped, wedged and silent in its box, can take the road.