Muddy Stilettos' Best Places to Live 2026: Five West Kent Entries, and One Borough Missing

Muddy Stilettos has published its 2026 Best Places to Live list, and West Kent has done well out of it: five of Kent's eight entries - Tunbridge Wells, Cranbrook, Sevenoaks, Penshurst and Marden - sit within the area this site covers. Royal Tunbridge Wells makes the list for the second year running. The other three Kent entries this year - Oare, Sandgate and Wye - are all well outside West Kent, near Faversham, Folkestone and Ashford respectively.

Royal Tunbridge Wells and Cranbrook both fall within Tunbridge Wells borough; Sevenoaks and Penshurst both sit in Sevenoaks district; Marden is in Maidstone borough. That leaves Tonbridge & Malling as the only one of West Kent's four boroughs with no entry on this year's list at all - not Tonbridge itself, not West Malling, not any of the borough's villages.

Tunbridge Wells was praised for its "excellent schools, seriously good restaurants and shopping" and a commute to London Bridge in as little as 44 minutes. Cranbrook - the "weather-boarded gem" with England's tallest working smock mill - has no station of its own, so commuters drive 10-15 minutes to Staplehurst or Marden instead. Sevenoaks was singled out for its "commuter-town trifecta" of schools, speed and green space, with 1,000 acres of Knole parkland in the middle of town and trains to London Bridge in as little as 22 minutes. Penshurst got credit for its "proper village shop", Forge Stores, and its centrepiece Penshurst Place, though the village's own station is actually two miles away near Chiddingstone Causeway. Marden's selling point is the opposite problem solved: its own mainline station, with trains to London Bridge in under an hour direct from the village.

A note on the numbers above: these are sold-price averages for each specific town or village, not the whole council area - and that makes a real difference. This site's own "West Kent Right Now" panel, powered by HM Land Registry's UK House Price Index, shows a single average across each entire borough: £452,845 for Tunbridge Wells borough and £535,810 for Sevenoaks district as of August 2026, for example. Muddy Stilettos' figures for the towns of Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks themselves - £530,758 and £914,994 - sit well above those borough-wide averages, because a borough figure also includes its cheaper towns and villages (Paddock Wood and Pembury pull down the Tunbridge Wells borough number; Swanley and Edenbridge do the same for Sevenoaks district). Both figures are legitimate - they're just answering different questions, and the gap between a town centre and its wider borough can be large, as much as 70% in Sevenoaks' case.

Marden comes out as the most affordable of the five by some distance, and also the only one with a direct mainline station in the village itself. Sevenoaks and Penshurst, by contrast, average well over £900,000 - more than double Marden's figure - for the trade-off of faster schools, shopping and a shorter commute. Source: Muddy Stilettos: Tunbridge Wells, Cranbrook, Sevenoaks, Penshurst, Marden