Tarantulas have been spotted in Oxfordshire

Your article has disappeared sadly, but I’m almost prepared to wager ready money they mean Atypus affinis which is a mygalomorph = stout basal spider with fangs that point straight down rather than cross over each other and no cribellum = tarantula in common speech*.
However, it’s less than an inch long in the largest females, hardly a whopper. England is the extreme northern end of their range and the taxon is our only tarantula. Rather wonderful.
Apart from the odd disoriented vagrant in a box of bananas**, I am very, very doubtful of big mygalomorphs in Britain, certainly not going native.
*The original Italian Lycosa tarantula, the species associated with tarantism in superstition/folklore and supposedly the tarantella, isn’t a mygalomorph tarantula at all but a relatively brawny and impressive aranaeomorph. Also highly unlikely to be a danger to humans.
** Although the most famous banana spider, the Phoneutria fera or nigriventer, called together the Brazilian wandering spider, which is the “highly deadly black tarantula” of Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song and which used to crop up on Glasgow wharves when my late father was a young reporter, a magnificent and really rather dangerous creature, isn’t a tarantula either. Yet another aranaeomorph.
The most alarming tarantulas I know of, from our human point of view (which is rather a limited one), are the genuinely potentially dangerous Atrax species of Australia. That said, they are magnificent as well as dried specimens and I would dearly love to see a live one, albeit at a safe distance.
Edit — please forgive me, I had no idea that this thread was from before Christmas.