Pimlico is well connected, and most of its residents hardly use the connections. A Tube station is in the middle of the district and a mainline terminus sits on its edge. Half the working population stayed home at the last census. Two in three households have no car. Everything is close, and nobody seems to be in a hurry to get anywhere.
Pimlico station is on the Victoria line. London Victoria Rail Station, at the northern edge, adds the District and Circle lines and National Rail, and Vauxhall Rail Station is across the river to the south-east. Riverboats to Waterloo and Southwark leave from Millbank Millennium Pier. Pimlico has 91 bus stops, with the 24, 360 and C10 running through the middle and more along Vauxhall Bridge Road. Even so, at the 2021 Census only about 2% of working residents took the train to work and about 6% the bus. A short walk from one of London's biggest terminals, almost nobody commutes by train.
The commute mix explains it. At the 2021 Census about 55% of working residents worked from home, about 13% walked, about 7% drove and about 4% cycled. About 68% of households have no car, and only about 5% have two or more. For a large share of Pimlico, the office is either the kitchen table or close enough to walk to.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics are modelled averages for the whole area, built on 2019 services. They put the nearest town centre about 13 minutes away by car, 18 by public transport, 15 by bike and 32 on foot. The same source puts a GP about 5 minutes away on foot or by public transport, or 7 by car, and a food shop about 3 minutes' walk or 6 minutes' drive. A hospital takes about 13 minutes by car or 20 by public transport, and the nearest cluster of jobs about 5 minutes by car or 8 by public transport. The distances don't change. The public transport times are the shakiest of the set, because they predate whatever service cuts came after 2019. On foot, a five-minute walk to the doctor is the kind of distance most of the country drives.
The buses are a service, and a busy one. Pimlico's stops average about 460 scheduled departures each on a weekday and about 24 an hour at peak, and 98% of stops have some weekend service. Those are current timetables, so they're more reliable than the 2019 journey times.
Broadband is strong. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 89% of premises, superfast about 98%, and no premises fall below the legal minimum service level. Mobile coverage is complete, with every network reaching every postcode in the area.
The price of all this access is traffic noise. Every postcode in Pimlico is near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which the official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels or more. Rail noise is a separate source, and about 7% of postcodes are near or above the same 65-decibel threshold for it. Which way a flat faces decides how much of either you hear, so look at a rear-facing room on a weekday morning and compare it with the front.
There are 136 public charge points in the area, with 146 connectors between them, but only three are rapid units. Charging an electric car here is something to plan for, because there aren't enough rapid points to rely on topping up while you run an errand.
For most journeys Pimlico residents walk, take one bus or open a laptop, and the station on the doorstep is there for the days they need it. It's well connected on everything that counts, short of being the best-connected place in London, and the main cost is the traffic noise outside the window.