The DEEP SOUTH

Oxford, Bath, Brighton, Windsor: all teeter vertiginously high at the top of every London visitor’s must-do day-trip list. Rather than following the hordes snaking out of the city on such well-trod paths, however, let us guide you down another road, one less travelled, that begins just south of Croydon and is less than an hour from the capital. Welcome then to England’s “Deep South”, the area directly below London’s M25 ring road, that stretches down towards the coast and takes in south-west Surrey and the beautiful west of Sussex.

For here, in this oft-overlooked area of natural beauty (some of which is officially designated as such) there is, it seems, something in the soil. The same lands that spawned the legendary father of modern gardening, William Robinson, and his extraordinary garden at Gravetye Manor, also produced