Bracknell

Hello,

My husband and I moved to Bracknell 2 weeks ago. We moved from Charleston, SC. We are currently staying at a company flat and do not like it at all (it is tiny, and very loud during the day and night, and Bracknell is not great either...). We need to move out soon or I will go insane!!!

We are looking at a 3 bedrooms house (detached or semi detached) in a city close to Bracknell (less than 30 min commute) and close to public transportation (I do not have a car yet). I am looking at rightmove.com and see a lot of nice houses but I have no idea how nice the towns are.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Wokingham is really lovely. It is a market town with a train station. RG40 / RG41

Woodley is a nice suburb in Reading. It's in RG5. No train, though. Only buses.

Try http://www.upmystreet.com/ to understand neighbourhoods.

For lettings:

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent.html
http://www.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/
http://www.findaproperty.com/][url]http://www.findaproperty.com/[/url]

For no car, I'd choose Wokingham. 

Thanks!  I will check it out!

Poor you - Bracknell is such a boring place to live!  Any idea of your budget would really help.  I live in Bagshot, just down the A322 from Bracknell and am quite familiar with the surrounding area.  Do you plan to get a car in the future or will you always rely in public transport?

We are looking at a 2 or 3 bedrooms house (semi detached or detached), unfurnished for less than 1000 pounds.  Is it feasible?

I will probably get a car within the next couple of months.

Hi cocinelle,

Just replying to you from Savannah GA at the moment and was just shopping at the Tanger outlets at Hilton Head in SC !

I think you'd struggle to find a 2/3 bedroom house unfurnished for £1K/month which offers a respite from noise and being a bit of a dump i'm afraid. The surrounding smaller villages and towns well within the 30 min commute you'd like are indeed very nice, however they'll also be considerably more expensive unfortunately.

That said, if you keep hunting around and looking at various properties and most likely increase that budget by perhaps £200-250 or so, I think you should be able to find something that you feel better living in. Keep an eye on council tax amounts you'll have to pay as well though as they'll also be correspondingly higher too.

Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!

Thanks Dennis.  We could go as high as 1250 pounds (which is what we used to pay for a 2700 square feet house in Charleston...).  How is the weather?
Any nice little town I should look for (besides Wokingham)?

Cocinelle

For £1000/mo and if you plan to get a car, you'd probably get the "most for your money" near Dennis' neck of the woods in Slough. It's not a village, but if you ask Dennis, its the best place in the whole of the UK  
 
You could probably find a few 2-3 bed terraced houses in Wokingham for that price, but you may struggle for semi-detached and certainly detached properties.

Woodley and other eastern Reading suburbs would be good to check out, or you might want to look into Sandhurst or Camberley or Woking.  We have a 3 bed end-of-terrace house in Camberley available in June

Thanks Mirrajay.  We are now looking at Reading and Woking since these towns have easy access to London.  Any nice, quiet, and safe neighborhoods we should look at (besides Woodley). 

How is the commute from Reading to Bracknell?

By car, about a half an hour for Wokingham & Woodley (Part of Wokingham), Earley / Lower Earley, Winnersh (Parts of Reading).

You could also consider Earley / Lower Earley, as Earley has a train station. Winnersh, Winnersh also has a train station, IIRC. Maybe these two, if public transport is central. I think it would be good if you wanted to minimise the cost and hassle of driving. Getting to the Oracle on a Saturday, I always felt was the centre of hell when we lived there for all the traffic, and that was over a decade ago!   

Hi,

Mirrajay - Centre of the universe actually !

Cocinelle - I haven't kept an eye on rents in areas nearby to Bracknell and Reading etc, but a good indicator of pricing would be on rightmove.co.uk. There's plenty of little towns and villages around this area, so you'll be able to search quite a few of them to get a better idea overall. As mapleleafgirl mentions, public transport is around, so that may suit you better, however for convenience a car is much better. The general consensus of Slough is that it isn't so 'great', but it is an industrial town and economically, it's doing very well. As per many towns in the UK, just around the outskirts are the 'nice' areas, with price tags to match, a few areas further in are also highly desirable too, again, with similar price tags. All depends on what you'd like to have Vs the amount you wish to pay out! for comparisons sakes, I'd guess for a 2700 Sq FT home in the UK around this and nearby areas you'd most likely have to double the amount you paid in the US for a similar sized property, if not slightly more ! - the weather in SC was lovely on that day, was even hotter 95-98F in Vegas and LA a few days later !

Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!

Thanks to all of you for your answers.

I just realized that my original post was not very clear...  My husband has a car but it is a company car so I cannot drive it.  I will probably still buy a used car at some point because I have a 5 months old and it is not always easy to use public transportation with him.  Also we still want to be close to a train station to get to London.  I still have to find a job and I want to make sure that I can go to London within 45 min.

We went to Lower Earley this morning and really liked it as it seems very family oriented and it is so close to Reading!  We also went to Twyford and I thought it was beautiful.  My husband thinks it may be too isolated.  We checked out Wokingham as well but did not like it as much as the other towns I mentioned.  We did not have the time to see Woodley yet.

Dennis no worries!  I do not expect to rent a 2700 square feet townhouse!  A 800 sq. f will do.

Does any of you know how long the commute is from Twyford to Bracknell.  It took us about 20 min this morning but wonder how long it will take during rush hours.

Twyford is lovely as is the neighbouring village of Sonning.  I would say that worst case the commute time might double = 35 -40 minutes. 

Oh, I forgot about Twyford!