Malden writing in 1911 associates closely the Domesday entry in Latin meaning 'Bishop Osborn of Exeter holds Woking' with this manor which his successors later held, since there is no trace of any land held by the Bishop of Exeter in Woking in pipe rolls, Assize Rolls, feet of fines or the records of Lambeth Palace.

[3] The village is the site of Horsley Towers, a gothic mansion designed by Sir Charles Barry (later the architect of the Houses of Parliament) for William Currie in place of an earlier building.

Currie, a distiller and banker, had bought the property in 1784 and over the next 44 years made extensive changes to the village, including rebuilding most of its houses, establishing the school and restoring the church.

In the early 1900s, the 3rd Earl of Lovelace applied restrictive covenants on most of his former fields when selling these to private developers, leading to the overwhelming proportion of homes being detached.

As such it forms a cross between a nucleated village and dispersed settlement directly north of this road, with a wide array of medium-sized individual home plots typically of 0.4 acres (0.16 ha).

[5] The main row of shops is near the western railway station on a local thoroughfare from the end of Forest Road towards Ockham, a small number of professions operate here, such as accountants, opticians and the NHS medical practice.

[7] The Nomad Theatre is a well-equipped amateur production stage[8] which is behind the smaller of East Horsley's two rows of shops, Bishopsmead Parade.

East Horsley had 1,343 detached homes (of which 1,309 were inhabited) and fewer than 183 of any other dwelling types at the 2011 census, and a high proportion of business-owners and directors, accordingly it was deemed Britain's "richest village" by The Daily Telegraph in 2011[9] and again in 2015.