Buying or selling a house in
Tatsfield
Tatsfield is a village and civil parish in the Tandridge district of Surrey, standing at around 230 metres on the North Downs where the Surrey, Kent and Greater London boundaries meet. It appears in Domesday as Tatelefelle but is overwhelmingly a twentieth-century village, with only four listed buildings. The nearest station is Oxted. Vine Estates handles a small number of sales here personally.
What it’s actually like
Tatsfield sits right at the top of the North Downs, around two hundred and thirty metres up, and the views are the reason most people come. It's a friendly, well-kept village with a good primary school and a twelfth-century church on the hill, and it stays genuinely quiet despite being close to the London boundary. The BBC ran a receiving station just outside the village for forty-five years until 1974.
“Seven hundred and fifty feet up on the downs, and still close to everything. Tatsfield gets the best of both.”
David Johnston
The houses
Tatsfield is an old settlement with very little old fabric — four listed buildings in the whole parish, all Grade II. The ancient manor house, Tatsfield Court Lodge, was demolished before 1801. What survives is the church, of the twelfth century with thirteenth-century alterations, a tower of 1838 and a late-Victorian timber-framed porch, built of rubblestone with stone dressings under plain tiles; and three secular buildings, Colegates, The Manor House and Westwood Farm House. Everything else is twentieth century.
Getting to London
Tatsfield has no station. Oxted, about four miles away, is managed by Southern with peak Thameslink services, and runs direct to both London Victoria, fastest around 38 minutes, and London Bridge, with four trains an hour off-peak in total.
Schools
Tatsfield Primary School on Ship Hill serves the village and moved to a new site beside the village hall in 2010. There is no secondary school and no independent school in the parish; the nearest secondary is Oxted School.
Common questions
Is Tatsfield in Surrey or Kent?
Surrey, in the Tandridge district. The confusion comes from the postcode: TN16 is the Westerham postal district, so Tatsfield addresses often read as Kent. The county boundary with Kent is less than half a mile to the east, and Greater London is adjacent on three sides.
How many listed buildings are there in Tatsfield?
Four, all Grade II — the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Colegates, The Manor House and Westwood Farm House. There is no Grade I or Grade II\* building in the parish, and no conservation area either. This is a village whose character is twentieth-century rather than historic.
What was the BBC station at Tatsfield?
The BBC Tatsfield Receiving Station, which operated from 1929 to 1974 just outside the village. It was used for monitoring and measuring broadcast transmissions, and its masts and shortwave aerials were a prominent landmark on the downs for forty-five years.
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