Herne Hill is well connected for a district without a Tube station. Its own station runs straight into the City and to Victoria. Buses come every couple of minutes at peak. Broadband is fast almost everywhere. The catch is noise, because the roads that carry all that traffic run past nearly every front door.
Herne Hill Rail Station has direct trains to London Blackfriars, City Thameslink and Farringdon on one line and to London Victoria on another. North Dulwich and Tulse Hill are close by for London Bridge, and Denmark Hill is within reach for the Overground. The nearest Underground is at Brixton. There are 124 bus stops in and around the area. At the 2021 census, 6% of working residents took the train to work and 8% the bus, figures that look small mainly because of what everyone else was doing.
What everyone else was doing was staying in. The census was taken during the pandemic, and 57% of working residents said they worked mainly from home, a share that has probably fallen since. Of those who did travel, 8% drove, 7% cycled and 6% walked. About 48% of households have no car at all, and only 9% have two or more. A district with two railway lines and a car-free half had, on census day, mostly decided to go nowhere.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which date from 2019, put the nearest town centre about 8 minutes away by car, 9 by bike, 11 by public transport and 11 on foot. Walking and the bus take about as long as each other, and only one of them depends on a timetable.
Everyday errands are close. The same 2019 Department for Transport modelling puts a GP about 7 minutes away by car, 8 on foot and 8 by public transport, and a food shop about 6 minutes' walk or 7 minutes by car. A hospital is about 10 minutes by car and 19 by public transport, and a centre of employment about 6 minutes by car and 11 by public transport. These are averages across the area, and the distances will have held up better than the public transport times, which describe the bus and train network as it ran in 2019.
The buses themselves are current and frequent. Stops with timetable data average about 517 scheduled departures each on a weekday, with about 28 buses in a typical peak hour, and every one of them has a weekend service. That is a count of departures, not of separate routes, though at those numbers the difference matters less than usual.
Broadband is a strength. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 90% of premises, and superfast about 99%, with no premises below the legal minimum service. Every network covers the whole area with 4G or 5G.
The cost of all that traffic is noise. About 99% of Herne Hill's postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official noise mapping treats it as significant, and the loudest band recorded is 75 decibels. Rail is a separate source, with about 33% of postcodes near or above 65 decibels from trains and a loudest band of 70. Standing in the front room during the rush hour is the cheapest noise survey a buyer will ever commission.
There are 203 public charge points in and around Herne Hill, with 215 connectors between them, and none of them are rapid. Charging an electric car here is something you plan overnight, not something you finish while buying milk.
For a typical commute, the picture is good. Anyone working in the City or the West End has a direct train from Herne Hill or a short bus ride to Brixton, and anyone who mostly works from home has the broadband to make that easy.
Herne Hill is better connected than most of south London manages without the Underground, held back by the lack of a Tube line of its own and the noise that comes with living beside its busy roads.