Month: October 2010

Moving out of the city

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Hillside above Todmorden

Next month will see Christine and I move in together. Furthermore, it’ll see me moving out of Bradford, which has been my adopted home city for over 8 years (bar a few gaps).

Right now, we’re looking at moving to Sowerby Bridge, a market town in Calderdale which is around 20 minutes away from Bradford by train. It’s quite a nice little town – it’s in the Calder Valley which is quite picturesque and almost all the buildings are stone-built. We haven’t yet settled on a specific house or apartment but we have some viewings over the next couple of weeks.

Compared with Bradford, Sowerby Bridge is very different. Bradford’s population is around 300,000 – Sowerby Bridge is home to around 10,000 people. I’ll also need to start commuting to work, unlike now where it’s within walking distance; that being said, I don’t expect to have to travel more than an hour each way in total, provided the trains behave themselves.

There’s also the issue of broadband internet. Generally the UK is good at providing fast broadband in cities, and I believe Virgin Media is due to roll out its 100 Mbps service in Bradford shortly, but out in more rural areas the speeds available drop quite a bit. The SamKnows Broadband Checker tells me that ADSL Max is available, and I can expect speeds of up to 6 Mbps, but that I’ll have to go with either TalkTalk, BT, or another ISP that has a package through OpenReach Wholesale. There’s no cable either, so no Virgin Media.

Yeah, I know. Trust me to focus on internet availability.

Still, I’m looking forward to a change of scenery. As much as I like Bradford, it would be nice to move somewhere a bit quieter, but still within easy reach of Leeds, Bradford and Manchester – in fact, Manchester and Leeds would be roughly the same distance away.

London’s public transport

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Bakerloo at Waterloo

As a non-Londoner who doesn’t drive, I am generally in awe of London’s public transport.

While any Londoner who’s had to make alternative arrangements during a tube strike will probably disagree, compared to the public transport available in most other British cities London is well ahead.

London Underground, or The Tube, is especially good. You get something like 20 trains every hour through central London, so you rarely have to wait more than 3 minutes for one. And it comes with at least 8 carriages, so you’re likely to be able to get on.

Its buses are cheap – £1.20 with an Oyster card for a single adult ticket (at the time of writing) – and pretty frequent too. And talking of Oyster, you have one card which lets you pay for basically any train, bus, tube or tram in greater London.

It’s not perfect; strikes, for one, happen more frequently than they probably should, and overcrowding is a problem. And the chaos which occurs when something breaks down during the peak periods.

Compare this to Bradford, where we have more expensive buses and no trams or tube to fall back on. The trains are thankfully cheaper but nowhere near as frequent, and not as pervasive – railway stations tend to be fewer and far between, so you’re left with the buses. Though we have some integrated ticketing, it’s only in the form of day rover tickets (which are only sold at travel interchanges) or weekly/monthly travel cards. There’s no pay-as-you-go scheme and it’s not a smartcard like Oyster.

London’s transport is on my mind as Christine and I are spending this weekend in London, and will hopefully be visiting London Zoo. It’s the first time I’ve been to London properly in almost three years, so naturally I’m a little excited.