Fulham is well connected for short trips and decent for longer ones. A bus comes past almost constantly. The rail stations are on its edges, not in the middle. At the last count most workers stayed at home, and about half of households have no car. For a lot of Fulham, the broadband is the fastest way out.
Imperial Wharf and West Brompton bring the rail network to Fulham's eastern side, and across the river Putney has a station of its own. At the 2021 census only about 2% of working residents went to work by train and about 6% by bus. There are 169 bus stops across the area. Fulham used to have another station: until 1940 there was a Chelsea and Fulham station on the same line, closed after bomb damage in the Second World War and never brought back.
The bigger shift is in how people get to work at all. At the 2021 census about 58% of working residents worked from home, about 9% walked, about 8% drove and about 5% cycled. About half of Fulham's households have no car, and only about 9% have two or more. Thomas Crofton Croker described Fulham from a pedestrian's point of view in a journal published in 1860, and walking is still one of the main ways people get around.
The Department for Transport's modelled figures put the nearest town centre about 7 minutes away by car, 8 by bike, 10 by public transport and 10 on foot. When walking takes the same time as the bus, the bus has mostly lost the argument.
For everyday trips across Fulham, that means the bike and your own feet do about as well as anything with an engine. The car only helps once you are leaving the area.
The same Department for Transport statistics give modelled area averages from 2019. A GP is about 6 minutes on foot, 6 by public transport and 7 by car. A hospital is about 11 minutes by car and 18 by public transport. A food shop is about 4 minutes' walk or 6 by car, and an employment centre about 5 minutes by car or 9 by public transport. The distances will not have moved since 2019. Bus and train services may have, so the public transport times are the shakiest of the set.
The bus figures are current and show a real service. The average stop sees about 497 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 27 buses in the peak hour, and every one of the 147 stops with timetable records has a weekend service.
Broadband is strong. About 89% of premises can get gigabit speeds, about 92% ultrafast and about 99% superfast. Every network covers the area for 4G or 5G, so a signal is never the problem.
Road noise is the cost of all those buses. About 62% of Fulham's postcodes are near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road traffic as significant, and the loudest band in the area reaches 75 decibels. Rail is a separate source: about 19% of postcodes are near 65 decibels from trains, with the loudest band at 70. The noise map shows which side of a building faces the traffic, so look up the exact property and check which way the bedrooms face.
Fulham has 808 public charge points with 879 connectors, but only 3 of them are rapid. That means charging an electric car here is something you plan for, usually overnight on a slow charger.
Fulham is better connected than most and short of the best. Buses, fibre and short walks cover almost everything, while the trains stay on its edges.