Cookham is reasonably well connected by road and thinly by everything else. It has its own station. Almost nobody uses it to get to work. More than half the people in work don't commute at all. Cookham dealt with the commute by mostly giving it up.
Cookham Rail Station is on the branch line through the village, and Maidenhead Rail Station is the change for the main line, with Bourne End, Furze Platt and Marlow Rail Stations on the same branch. At the 2021 census about 2% of working residents took the train to work. The area has 23 bus stops, and well under 1% of workers commuted by bus. Having a station is one thing. Having a village that uses it is another.
The census shows what Cookham does instead. About 57% of people in work worked from home and about 33% drove. Walking accounted for about 3% and cycling for about 1%. Only about 8% of households have no car, while about 55% have two or more. The cars here are mostly for the weekend and the weekday traffic is mostly broadband.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics are modelled averages for the area, and the public transport figures date from 2019, before services were cut, so they are the least reliable part of the set. On that modelling, the nearest town centre is about 13 minutes by car, 24 minutes by public transport, 19 by bike and 42 on foot. Forty-two minutes on foot is how far Cookham sits from being part of somewhere bigger, and the village seems content with that.
Superfast broadband reaches about 98% of premises, and no premises fall below the universal service minimum. Gigabit reaches about 60% and ultrafast about 62%. For a village where most of the working week happens at home, the gap between superfast and gigabit is the line that matters most in a property search. Ask the seller which service the house actually has, because availability on the street doesn't mean the house is connected.
Every postcode gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and from all of them.
For a typical working day, then, Cookham suits people with a car or a desk at home. A daily rail commute means the branch line and a change at Maidenhead, and only a small minority of residents make that trip.
On the same modelled 2019 basis, a GP is about 8 minutes by car, 15 by public transport and 16 on foot. A food store is about 14 minutes' walk or 8 minutes' drive, and employment centres are about 13 minutes by car or 16 by public transport. The hospital is the long one: about 24 minutes by car, 57 by public transport and nearly two hours on foot. That hospital time matters most to anyone in the house who no longer drives.
The bus service is current, unlike the modelled times. Each stop averages about 41 scheduled departures on a weekday and about three an hour at peak, and every stop with timetable data has a weekend service. That is a better service than the commuting figures suggest the village needs.
Every postcode in Cookham is close to a road at or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant. The loudest band recorded locally reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise doesn't register at that threshold anywhere. Postcode-level mapping can't tell you how a particular garden sounds, so go and listen at the morning rush.
Cookham has one public charge point with one connector, and no rapid chargers. Charging an electric car here is something you do at home, or plan around.
Overall Cookham is middling for connections: easy if you drive or work from home, hard if your week depends on a daily train or a hospital appointment without a lift.