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Forge Wood, Crawley — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Forge Wood is Crawley's 14th neighbourhood, built since 2014 between Balcombe Road and the Brighton Main Line, north of Pound Hill, south of Tinsley Green.
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Where to stay in Forge Wood
The practical side of choosing where to sleep.
Crawley is the booking level here. The application that became Forge Wood, lodged in January 1998, asked for dwellings, employment and retail floorspace, a community hall and a primary school, and no hotel appeared anywhere on it. Nothing has been added since, so the rooms that serve this address stand outside the neighbourhood.
The nearest concentration is the airport trade strung along Crawley Avenue at the southern boundary and out around Manor Royal, two to three kilometres west. Gatwick Airport keeps its own hotel belt about three kilometres northwest. What Forge Wood gives back in return is quiet.
The airport is roughly a twenty-minute walk from the northern edge by way of Radford Road, which is an odd thing to be able to say about an early-flight bed near a runway.
Few places to stay in Forge Wood — most visitors book in Crawley nearby.
About Forge Wood
What are the main landmarks in Forge Wood?
The Surrey and Sussex Crematorium stands at the centre of the neighbourhood, on Balcombe Road at RH10 3NQ, inside the ancient woodland that gave Forge Wood its name. It opened in 1956, and its operator lists 13 acres of gardens, two chapels named St Richards and the memorial chapel, and grounds that stay open every day of the year. Heathy Ground Farmhouse survived the building work.
Listed Grade II on 10 March 1992, the old farmhouse now stands on Daffodil Crescent among the new streets. Forge Wood Primary School sits on Somerley Drive and runs at its full capacity of 420 places for children aged four to eleven, graded Outstanding at its June 2019 full inspection and inspected again in January 2025.
What is the history of Forge Wood?
This ground sat in Worth parish until 1953, when it crossed from East Sussex into West Sussex and passed to Crawley Urban District three years after that. The land east of Balcombe Road stayed outside the New Town boundary and only reached the borough in 1983. Anthony Minoprio's 1947 master plan gave Crawley nine neighbourhoods, and four more followed, ending with Maidenbower in the late 1980s.
The Forge Wood application took thirteen years. George Wimpey and Persimmon Homes lodged it in January 1998, and the case ran through a refusal, two public inquiries, a High Court quashing in 2008 and a Secretary of State weighing the noise of a second Gatwick runway that was never built. Permission came in February 2011 and the first ground was broken in 2014.
Councillors settled the name on 5 December 2013, turning down Tinsley Green because it would be confused with Tinsley Lane over in Three Bridges.
Where is Forge Wood?
Forge Wood fills the northeast corner of Crawley borough, a rough rectangle held in by the Brighton Main Line on the west, the A2011 Crawley Avenue across the south, the M23 motorway to the east and Tinsley Green at the top. Balcombe Road, the B2028, runs south to north through the middle of it. Steers Lane heads north from Balcombe Road.
The Gatwick Stream drains the western side and the Environment Agency files it in the catchment of the River Mole, and its floodplain is the reason houses were kept off part of the site. Blackcorner Wood, St Crispin's Wood and The Larches were written into the layout as retained woodland with footpaths planned through them. Copthorne lies two and a half kilometres east across the motorway, close enough that a separate estate on its western side was approved with cycle paths pointed this way.
For statistics the neighbourhood is counted in the Pound Hill North and Forge Wood ward, an unparished part of Crawley.
Common questions
What is the best area to stay in Forge Wood?
Crawley: an early Gatwick departure slept off on a residential street rather than an airport concourse.
Updated September 2026