Thanks for the reply @kevinushey.
I was most probably downloading from the source previously. I have now downloaded the archive packages with .tar.gz format onto my drive.
This is an example of what I have now:
renv::install("some file path/tidyverse_1.2.1.tar.gz", type = "binary")
However, I am still seeing that R console is reading files from mran.microsft, instead of the location that I have specified, so it is still taking a while.