Public transport is the backbone of life in London. In fact, you can think of London itself as being a collection of villages, each of which has its own distinctive character, all connected by a transportation network that is the envy of Japan er… the rest of the UK.
Your experience of life in this fine city will be very dependent on the nature of the transport links in your local area.
Live near a major transport hub with multiple train and tube links? You’ll be able to reach other parts of the city in no time at all, not to mention being able to easily take trips out of London (or out of the UK altogether).
On the flip side, if you’re far away from a tube or train station, any journey you undertake will feel like a huge chore and you might feel very isolated.
FindMyArea
I built FindMyArea to help you easily find the perfect place to live. It’s a free tool where you pop in the stuff you care about (budget, commute destinations, local amenities etc) and then it gives you a list of areas in London (e.g. Hackney or Richmond) that satisfy your requirements.
FindMyArea also allows you to search for areas in London based on which train and tube lines they have. We’re going to use this feature to search for the best-connected areas in London.
Let’s see it in action!
All we’re going to do is put in every single train and tube line as a nice-to-have criterion and see what areas FindMyArea suggests.
Essentially, this will tell us which areas have the most train/tube lines (out of the 28 lines in total).
Obviously this is a very simplistic analysis – in reality you’d only be interested in lines that take you to places you want to go – but it’s a good indicator of how well-connected an area is overall.
Results
What we see is that the best-connected areas are almost all in central London, with the notable exception of Stratford.
If you were to live in Tower Hill, you’d have access to a remarkable 17 of the 28 London lines!
What does it mean to say you have “access” to a line? FindMyArea basically just checks to see if a tube or train line is within “reasonable walking distance” of an area; if it is, then it marks that line as “belonging” to the area.
For example, FindMyArea considers the Central line at Bank to be accessible from Tower Hill, just because it’s reasonable to walk to Bank from Tower Hill. (It’s a bit of a longer trek to London Bridge for the Jubilee line, but it’s not an unpleasant walk over the river!)
This is another reason central London locations do so well: even if you’re not technically in an area that contains a particular line, it’s so densely packed that you can easily walk to another part of central London that does have the line you’re looking for.
How far can you get in 35 minutes?
Let’s get an idea of how good these areas are for commuting by seeing how far you can travel in 35 minutes via public transport. All these maps were generated using TravelTime.
In 35 minutes from Tower Hill, you can get as far west as Hammersmith, as far east as Barking and all the way to Tottenham Hale to the north and Forest Hill to the south. Pretty impressive!
Let’s check out another commuter’s dream, King’s Cross.
You can travel so far in 35 minutes from King’s Cross that you actually need to zoom out to be able to see all the reachable areas – this is due to the excellent train links from King’s Cross Station.
For sheer breadth of coverage, I’d say King’s Cross is the best-connected area in all of London. It’s hard to argue with having direct trains to Paris on your doorstep!
The other end of the spectrum
Some parts of London aren’t so well-connected. We can see this by checking out the reachable areas from Teddington.
Teddington is in southwest London, and the areas reachable in 35 minutes are… also all in southwest London. Realistically you’ll have a pretty long commute into central London if you choose to live here.
Don’t get me wrong though – Teddington is a lovely area! It’s just not particularly well-connected.
Let’s have a look at one of its neighbours, Richmond, which is also technically far away from central London but is served by a number of train and tube lines.
Much better! With fast trains to Waterloo taking 15-20 minutes from Richmond Station, realistically you can get to most parts of central London in less than an hour from door to door.
Assuming no delays, of course. :-P
I’ve chosen some areas. How do I find out more?
If you want to research some areas more thoroughly, you could just use Google.
But to make your life a bit easier, FindMyArea creates a personalised “detail” page for each area that only shows the stuff that matters to you.
Just click on any area in the list or map to see its detail page.
From here, you can do further research into anything that particularly interests you:
- Click on “View Properties” to see property listings for your chosen area
- Click on any of the local amenities to see where they are on a map
- Click on the commute time to see the actual commute route itself, complete with directions
- Click on “Read More” to see the Wikipedia description of the area
Basically, just click on everything and you’ll see all sorts of useful stuff!
Don’t want to lose your results and criteria? Just hit the “Save Results” button to save everything to a permanent shareable link (no need to create an account).
When you’re ready to return, just use the shareable link to retrieve the same results again. You can also adjust your criteria some more if any new requirements have come up.
Try it for yourself
Take a look at the full list of the best-connected areas in London.
You can look at the results in detail and adjust the criteria to suit your specific requirements via the “Edit Filters” button.
Or enter your requirements from scratch to find the perfect area in London for you.
Thanks for reading! If you want to help me improve FindMyArea, you might like to join the beta program. Or just drop me a message the old-fashioned way for general comments and questions.