Marlow Street Dental has looked after families in Ashcombe Green and the villages around it since 1998. There are eight of us. The waiting room used to be somebody’s front parlour. We have stayed deliberately small, and this page explains why and what that means for you.
Established 1998 · Around two thousand registered patients · Ground-floor surgery with step-free access
About two thousand registered patients across three dentists. Small enough that reception will probably recognise your voice on the telephone.
A new patient examination is booked for forty minutes. We would rather run slightly long than see twice as many people badly.
Nobody here is paid more for recommending more treatment. It is the single most important thing on this page.
Sarah Fenwick had spent eight years in a busy town-centre practice where a check-up was ten minutes and the appointment book was decided by somebody she had never met. In 1997 she found number 14 Marlow Street empty, damp and for sale, and spent most of a year persuading a bank that a double-fronted Victorian house between a bakery and a veterinary surgery was a sensible place to put a dental practice.
The practice opened in the spring of 1998 with one surgery in what had been the dining room, a nurse three days a week, and a list of forty-one patients, most of whom had followed her from her previous job. The waiting room was the front parlour and still is. The original fireplace is still in it, blocked off and painted, with the magazines on the mantelpiece.
It grew, but slowly and on purpose. A second surgery went in upstairs in 2003 when the first associate joined. The hygiene room was carved out of a box room in 2009. The last significant building work was in 2019, when the back of the ground floor was reworked to make the downstairs surgery, the accessible toilet and the level entrance from the yard. That is as big as the building will sensibly go, which suits everyone concerned.
Sarah still works Monday to Thursday and still does most of the crown and bridge work. She says the practice is roughly the size she wanted it to be by about 2010 and that everything since has been a matter of keeping it there.
Figures as at January 2026. We review the list size once a year and close to new registrations for a while if the wait for a routine appointment starts creeping past a month.
None of this is remarkable. It is simply what we would want from a dentist ourselves, written down so that you can hold us to it.
A new patient examination is forty minutes and a routine check-up twenty. A large filling gets an hour rather than being squeezed into half of one. This is the main reason we cannot see everybody who rings, and we have decided we would rather turn people away than start rushing.
If we do run late, reception tells you when you arrive and offers to rebook.
If we use a technical word we will explain it, and if we forget, please stop us. We show photographs on the screen where they help, because a picture of your own tooth explains more in five seconds than five minutes of description ever will.
There is no such thing as an obvious question here. Ask the one you feel silly asking.
Every treatment plan is printed with each item costed before any work starts. The number you are quoted is the number you pay: laboratory work, materials and the follow-up check for that item are already in it. Written estimates are valid for three months.
If we find something unexpected mid-treatment, we stop and ask before continuing.
Where the diary allows it, you stay with the same dentist through a course of treatment and from year to year. Continuity matters enormously for anxious patients and it means somebody in the building actually remembers what your mouth looked like in 2019.
Tell reception who you would like to see and they will work around that clinician’s days.
Number 14 is a double-fronted house built around 1880, between the bakery and the veterinary surgery. It has been a dental practice since 1998 and a house for the hundred and eighteen years before that, which explains a certain amount about the floor levels.
The front door is level with the pavement. Through it is the waiting room — the original parlour, with the fireplace, six chairs, a low table, a water cooler and a box of books and quiet toys in the corner. Reception is on the right as you come in. The downstairs surgery, the accessible toilet and the office are all along the ground-floor corridor behind it.
The second surgery and the hygiene room are upstairs, up a staircase with a handrail on both sides. If stairs are difficult for you, say so when you book and we will make sure your appointment is booked downstairs; this is a routine thing to ask and it causes nobody any trouble.
Behind the building is a yard with six free parking spaces, reached from the lane beside the bakery. The back entrance from the yard is level, which for a lot of our patients is the easier way in. Full directions, buses and a sketch map are on the contact page.
The waiting room does get warm in July, which patients tell us about regularly and fairly. There is a fan, and cold water, and our apologies.
Not a dramatic story, but a reasonably steady one. Most of the significant dates involve either a member of staff arriving or a wall coming down.
One surgery in the old dining room, a nurse three days a week and forty-one patients, most of whom followed Sarah Fenwick from her previous practice. The parlour became the waiting room and has not changed much since, apart from the chairs.
The first associate joined and the front bedroom became the upstairs surgery. The list passed six hundred that year, largely by word of mouth around the primary school gates, which remains our most effective form of advertising by a considerable margin.
A box room upstairs was converted so that hygiene appointments no longer had to borrow a surgery. It is the smallest room in the building and the one patients most often comment on, because the window looks out over the allotments behind the yard.
Colin Reed joined as practice manager, inherited a filing system best described as geological, and spent two years putting the diary, the plan payments and the maintenance schedule onto a footing that did not depend on anybody’s memory.
The back of the ground floor was rebuilt to create the downstairs surgery, the accessible toilet and a level entrance from the yard. Aisha Nazir joined the same year. This was the last significant building work and, realistically, the last there is room for.
We started running assessments and reviews by video because there was no alternative, expected to stop as soon as there was, and then found that patients wanted them kept. They are now a permanent part of how the practice works, and have their own page.
Three dentists, one hygienist, around two thousand patients and a two to three week wait for a routine first appointment. We are taking new patients across all three dentists and expect to keep doing so through the year.
There is no head office here to send an inspector round, which means the checking has to be something we do to ourselves and then write down. It is the least interesting part of running a practice and one of the most important.
Every clinician completes continuing professional development each year and holds current training in medical emergencies and resuscitation, refreshed annually for the whole team including reception. Our nurses maintain decontamination records for every instrument set, and equipment is serviced on a published schedule pinned inside the office door.
We audit our own record-keeping twice a year and our x-ray justification once a year, taking a random sample of notes and marking them against a checklist. When an audit shows something slipping, the result goes on the agenda of the next practice meeting and somebody is made responsible for fixing it by the following one.
Full profiles for everyone, including which days each dentist works, are on the team section of the home page. Here is the shape of it.
Nobody has left the clinical team since 2019, and the shortest-serving member of staff has been here six years. In a sector where turnover is normal, we regard that as the single most useful thing we can tell a prospective patient about the practice.
It matters practically as well as sentimentally. When the same nurse has set up for the same dentist for eleven years, appointments run to time, instruments are where they should be, and somebody notices when a patient who is normally chatty goes quiet in the chair.
We pay for everybody’s registration and training, we close for lunch so that people actually get one, and we do not run a diary that requires anybody to work through it.
Questions about treatment, fees and first appointments are answered on the home page. These are the ones about us.
A short introductory video appointment costs nothing and involves no examination. Plenty of anxious patients start there.
Directions, parking, buses, opening hours and a short enquiry form are on the contact page.
What we hold on your record, who sees it and how long we keep it is set out in the privacy notice.