The London postcode area that stretches to the coast
Do you share your postcode with the seaside? Some Londoners do, but how can this possibly be?
And that's proper seaside, not some miserable stretch of the Thames Estuary which is the best Becontree (RM) or Sidcup (DA) can manage. We're talking sunshine coast with beaches, piers, pavilions and cliff lifts, plus the waves of the English Channel lapping against the pebbles. Could this be where you live?
The Queen's SW postcode only reaches Wimbledon. Wembley's HA postcode barely scrapes Hertfordshire. My E postcode at least makes it into Essex. But there is a part of the capital that shares its postcode with the actual coast of actual Sussex and also actual Kent, and that is actually astonishing.
Where you need to live is Bromley, which is interesting because Bromley has its own postcode area which is BR but it turns out not all of the London borough of Bromley is covered by the Bromley postcode.
Is Crystal Palace the special place we seek? No it is not. Could it be Chislehurst? No it's not there either. Perhaps it's Orpington, but let me stop you there and tell you it isn't. We need to look deeper south than that, almost down on the border with Kent but not quite. There's even an airport.
The postcode area in question is much bigger than you might expect it to be. It crosses the London boundary and the M25, then the environs of Sevenoaks and the High Weald as far as Bodiam Castle, Ashford International and Dungeness power station. These are not addresses you want get muddled with a house in the capital, but the Royal Mail makes this potentially possible.
A lot of Kent is covered by the Medway (ME) and Canterbury (CT) postcodes. These do not reach London so Folkestone, Margate and Sheerness cannot be within the postcode area we seek. Instead we're talking about the southwestern part of the county and even quite a bit of East Sussex because that's how big it is.
The southeast edge of London is very rural, including back lanes that get hardly any bus services or none at all. This is where we find the special postcode dribbling over the border and a few cottages getting their mail delivered from a sorting office outside London rather than within.
One such residence belongs to Nigel Farage whose bolthole on Single Street is just the right side of the dividing line, whereas slightly further up the lane in Luxted and Downe would be BR6. Our Nige may be properly peeved to live within the fiefdom of mayor Sadiq Khan but at least he shares his postcode with the Kent coast.
Another lucky location is Cudham - less a village, more a linear hamlet - whose residents also have this seaside postcode. The furthest north it goes is probably Snag Farm in Hazelwood, an even less significant settlement but somehow an amazing 40 miles from the opposite edge alongside the English Channel.
The massive postcode area in question is in fact the TN postcode area, which sounds like it ought to be named after Tonbridge but is in fact centred on Royal Tunbridge Wells. This spa town serves a relatively small part of Kent but its postal hinterland is inexplicably vast, from TN1 all the way up to TN40 for Bexhill-on-Sea.
The postcode districts that scrape the edge of London are in the low teens. One is TN14 which is officially Sevenoaks but reaches out to Knockholt, Shoreham and Otford in Kent plus the aforementioned Cudham. The other is TN16, officially Westerham, which amazingly even includes a bit of Surrey which'd be the village of Tatsfield.
Your best chance of being a Londoner with a seaside postcode comes if you live in Biggin Hill, as ten thousand people do. Its steep residential avenues all come under the TN16 remit, as does the Waitrose on Main Road and of course the whole of the airport complex. Fly from Biggin Hill to London Ashford Airport on Romney Marsh and it's TN all the way.
So there you have it, a sprawling postcode area that somehow contains Biggin Hill and Bexhill, Cudham and Camber Sands, and Hazelwood and Hastings. You might even be one of the Londoners who live in it, the mighty TN... the postcode that stretches from the capital to the coast.
