Badly, unless you count the broadband. Around two-thirds of households run more than one car. Six in ten drive to work and roughly a third never leave the house to do it. Trains account for a rounding error and buses for less. What connects Alderholt to the world is a driveway and a fibre line, not a timetable.
There is no railway station. The line that once served the village closed in 1964 and nothing has replaced it, which shows up in the census as around 0.1 percent of residents commuting by train. That share is small enough that it may describe a single determined person with a very long walk at one end. Buses fare barely better: 18 stops sit within the area, and around 0.3 percent of residents use one to get to work. Eighteen stops sounds like a network until you consider how often anything calls at them.
The commute mix tells the real story. Around 60 percent drive, and roughly 32 percent work from home, which between them account for almost everyone. About 4 percent walk to work and around 1 percent cycle. Only about 4 percent of households have no car at all, while roughly 66 percent have two or more. That last figure is the whole argument in one number. Alderholt is not a place where people choose a second car out of indulgence. It is a place where the second car is the only way two adults can both be somewhere else at nine in the morning.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre at about 17 minutes by car and about 35 by public transport. Twice the time, on a service you have to plan your day around, to reach the same shops. That ratio is why the driveway wins every argument in this village.
Broadband is the genuine consolation and it is a substantial one. Gigabit-capable connections reach around 75 percent of premises, ultrafast the same, and superfast coverage runs to about 99 percent. No premises fall below the universal service obligation. For a village with no station, having near-universal superfast and three-quarters gigabit coverage is the difference between a rural address and a remote one.
Mobile is comprehensive. Every postcode has fourth or fifth generation coverage from at least one operator, and around 97 percent have it from all of them, so the question of which network to be on barely arises here.
What this adds up to in practice is that the car is not a convenience, it is infrastructure. Working from home is the local solution rather than a lifestyle preference, and a third of the village has already arrived at it. Anyone planning to commute daily by public transport should test the actual service before committing to anything, because the modelled times assume a bus that exists on the day you need it.
On the other modes, the same journey-time modelling gives about 32 minutes to the nearest town centre by bicycle and about 78 minutes on foot. An hour and a quarter of walking is not a commute, it is an afternoon. These figures are modelled national statistics for the area rather than a route measured from any particular door, and the public transport numbers date from 2019, so services may have thinned since. Car and walking distances age far better than bus timetables do.
For everyday things, the same source puts a doctor's surgery at around 11 minutes by car, 25 by public transport and 44 on foot. A hospital is about 33 minutes by car and roughly 120 minutes by public transport, which is the point at which the measure stops being useful and starts being a warning. A food store is about eight minutes by car and around 17 on foot, which is the one genuinely walkable errand on the list. Employment centres model at about 46 minutes by car and 30 by public transport, an inversion odd enough to be worth checking against a real journey before relying on it.
One thing worth knowing before a second viewing: every postcode in the area sits near or above the 65-decibel threshold that official noise mapping treats as significant road noise, with the loudest band reaching 75 decibels. Rail noise does not feature at all, for the obvious reason. Village quiet is not the same as silence, and road position matters more here than anyone expects it to.
Connectivity is the weakest thing about Alderholt by a wide margin. Excellent broadband cannot compensate for no station, a token bus presence and a hospital run that public transport cannot realistically make, so plan on driving or plan on staying in.