Dense large-scale matrices coming from integral equations and tensor-product grids can be approximated by a sum of Kronecker products with further sparsi cation of the factors via discrete wavelet transforms, which results in reduced storage and computational costs and also in good preconditioners in the case of uniform one-dimensional grids. However, irregular grids lead to a loss of approximation quality and, more signi cantly, to a severe deterioration in ef ciency of the preconditioners that have been considered previously (using a sparsi cation of the inverse to one Kronecker product or an incomplete factorizationapproach). In this paper we propose to use non-standard wavelet transforms related to the irregular grids involved and, using numerical examples, we show that the new transforms provide better compression than the Daubechies wavelets. A further innovation is a scaled two-level circulant preconditioner that performs well on irregular grids. The proposed approximation and preconditioning techniques have been applied to a hypersingularintegral equation modelling ow around a thin aerofoil and made it possible to solve linear systems with more than 1 million unknowns in 15-20 minutes even on a personal computer.