How the practice started
Tranquil Vale Dental opened on 3 March 2014 in what had been a bookshop, halfway up the hill between the station and the heath. We kept the shelves. They hold plants and a few old books now, and they are the first thing most people mention.
Anjali Mehta qualified at King’s College London in 2004 and spent the next nine years in NHS practice in Catford. She liked the work and she liked the patients. What she found hard was the clock. Appointments were short, the waiting room was always full, and the people who suffered most from that were the ones who were already frightened. Some of them had not seen a dentist in ten years, and a short slot was never going to change that.
So when she opened her own practice, she built it around time. A first visit here is an hour. A check-up is half an hour. The first appointment of every day in the downstairs surgery is kept as a quiet appointment, when the waiting room is empty and nothing is running in the next room. If you are nervous, you can come in beforehand just to look around, with no examination and no charge.
The name is the street. It also describes what we were trying to do, which is to run a practice that feels calm to walk into. We don’t play music in the surgeries unless you ask for it. We explain what we are about to do before we do it. If you raise your hand, we stop.
The second thing Anjali wanted was prices people could read before they came in. Our full fee list is on this website and at the front desk, and it is the same list for everyone. Before any treatment beyond a check-up, you get a written plan with the cost of each item. If the plan needs to change once treatment has started, we tell you and agree it with you before we carry on.
The practice has grown slowly. Lucy Fenn has run the front desk and the business side since the week we opened. Rosa Delgado joined as lead dental nurse in 2015, the year we started offering sedation. Grace Adebayo joined as our hygienist in 2016, and Dr Tom Hale joined in 2017 with his special interest in implants and in restorative dentistry, which means rebuilding worn, broken and missing teeth. Esme Carter and Callum Price complete the team. There are three surgeries now: one on the ground floor with step-free access, and two upstairs.
We are a private practice and we don’t provide NHS treatment. Private dentistry costs more, and we know that. It is why we publish every fee and offer a membership plan that spreads the cost of routine care across the year. If a plan wouldn’t save you money, the calculator on our membership page will tell you so.
Most of our patients live within a couple of miles: Blackheath, Lee, Greenwich, Kidbrooke, Charlton and Hither Green. Plenty of them came to us after putting off the dentist for years. If that sounds like you, you would be welcome here. You can ring us, say “I’m nervous”, and we will take it from there.