A clearance agent built by people who import for a living.
We started on the other side of the desk: booking containers, chasing documents and paying the duty bills. Fourwaters exists to make that side of trade simpler for everyone else.
What Fourwaters Freight does, in one paragraph.
Fourwaters Freight Limited is a UK customs clearance agent and freight forwarder. We submit import and export declarations to HMRC's Customs Declaration Service, arrange sea and air freight, and handle the haulage, devanning, palletising and storage that get goods from the quay to where they earn their keep. Our home ports are Felixstowe, London Gateway, Southampton and Liverpool, and we clear goods at every UK sea port and airport. We work for UK importers and exporters who want one team, one number and straight answers.
Four rivers carry Britain's trade. We work all four.
Nearly everything Britain imports in a container arrives on one of four rivers. The Orwell brings ships to Felixstowe, the country's largest container port. The Thames serves London Gateway. The Solent carries the deep-sea calls into Southampton. The Mersey feeds Liverpool and the north west.
Most agents grow up at one port and treat the others as somebody else's patch. We built Fourwaters the other way around: one team working all four waters from day one, so your cargo gets the same handling whichever river it arrives on. That is the whole name, and the whole idea.
We learned this business by paying its invoices.
Fourwaters grew out of an established UK trading group that has imported containerised goods from Asia and North America for its own businesses: booking the freight, preparing the customs paperwork, claiming the duty preferences and dealing with the holds when they happened. Running clearances for our own cargo taught us where shipments actually go wrong: a missing document, a lazy commodity code, a port query nobody chases. We built Fourwaters to run other people's cargo with the care we demanded for our own.
Three habits you can hold us to.
We answer with numbers
Quotes within one working day, itemised so you can see freight, clearance, haulage and handling separately. Phones answered Monday to Friday, 08:30 to 17:30.
We check before we submit
Documents are checked and commodity codes confirmed before a declaration goes anywhere near HMRC. Fixing paperwork before arrival is cheaper than fixing a hold after it.
We tell you the real position
If your shipment is held, you hear it from us first, with what it means and what happens next. No jargon, no runaround.
Put us to work on your next shipment.
Call 0161 262 0189 or send the details and we will come back within one working day.