It's a giant house spider, relatively harmless, and indigenous to U.K.
While they "could" bite you, they generally don't bite, and are harmless.
They did hold the guiness record for fastest spider though. Just thought I'd let ya know.
So....this whole tarantula thing was a false alarm?
But it still isn't a tarantula
We have native tarantulas in southeast Colorado, so I was trying to figure out how there could be tarantulas in England with their climate
You could always catch it and keep it as a watch spider to scare off any other spiders?
We have tons of black widows out here. Recluses are rare here, but they turn up occasionally.
When I was working out east of Denver, it was in a new industrial park built out in the middle of a field basically. One day in the building we found a couple of black widows, so the company decided to call an exterminator. When he arrived and started spraying, he made sure to get up in between the walls outside (it was a steel building). Once the poison was up there, there were literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of black widows that fell out from between the walls.
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05512.html
Colorado spiders
Look, it was a fuggin big spider and I was scared
Little know fact about tarantulas...their internal pressure is not quite balanced against the outer atmosphere so if you push them against a wall or drop them to the floor, they're pretty much toast.
They won't blow up or anything cool like that.
*this applies to tarantulas only, not ghey little spiders like Minz complained about