Mortimer has excellent broadband and patchy connections to everywhere else. Nearly half its workers commute by laptop. Most of the rest drive. The train and the buses barely count. The quickest way out of Mortimer is a video call.
Mortimer Rail Station is in the village, and Aldermaston Rail Station, Bramley (Hants) Rail Station and Reading Green Park are the other stations within reach. At the last census about 1% of working residents took the train to work, and about 1% took the bus. There are 17 bus stops. For a village with its own railway line, those commuting figures are low enough to show which side of the argument the line lost.
This is how the village gets to work. At the last census about 48% of working residents worked mainly from home and about 42% drove. Walking managed about 4% and cycling about 1%. About 54% of households have two or more cars, and only about 10% have none. Mortimer's transport plan is broadband for the job and a car for everything else, and at the census the rail line came nowhere near the driveway in the commuting figures.
The nearest town centre is about 24 minutes away by car and about 63 minutes by public transport. By public transport, that's most of a morning's patience spent reaching a town the car gets to in under half an hour.
Broadband is where Mortimer stops apologising for itself. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 85% of premises, ultrafast about the same, and superfast reaches all of them. No premises fall below the universal service minimum. A home office here doesn't depend on luck with the phone line.
Mobile coverage is as good. There's 4G or 5G from at least one operator across 100% of the area, and from every operator across 99%. Nobody here has to stand at an upstairs window to make a call.
In practice, a typical commute from Mortimer is a drive, or no journey at all. Anyone expecting to rely on the train for a daily office run should time the door-to-platform-to-desk journey on a wet weekday before buying, not after.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics are modelled for the area as a whole, not a route from any particular front door. They put the nearest town centre about 24 minutes away by car, 52 by bike, 63 by public transport and 120 on foot. A two-hour walk to town is the plainest measure of how far out Mortimer sits.
For everyday destinations the same statistics, which date from 2019, put a GP surgery about 9 minutes away by car, 20 by public transport and 27 on foot. A hospital is about 26 minutes by car and 73 by public transport. A food store is about 18 minutes' walk or 8 minutes by car. An employment centre is about 44 minutes by car and 14 by public transport, a published combination worth checking against your own workplace, because it tells you little about any particular job. Journey distances don't change, but bus services have been cut since 2019, so trust the public transport times less than the car and walking ones.
Bus stops are only as good as the buses that stop at them. The current timetables average about 25 departures per stop on a weekday and about two in the peak hour. About 70% of stops have any weekend service at all. That's a service, just not one to organise a working week around. Anyone relying on it at weekends will learn which 30% of stops have no service.
Official noise mapping treats 65 decibels as the level at which road noise becomes significant. On the published mapping, 100% of Mortimer's postcodes are recorded near or above that threshold, with the loudest band reaching 75 decibels. Rail noise is mapped separately: 100% of postcodes are recorded near that threshold for rail too, with the loudest band at 70 decibels. Those are area-level mapping figures, and they don't predict what any particular bedroom will sound like. Visit at rush hour.
Mortimer's connectivity is middling overall. The broadband is first-rate and every physical journey leans on the car.