South Norwood is very well connected, and the railway junction at its centre is the reason. A major interchange station is a few minutes from most homes, with three more stations close by. The buses run all week. Gigabit broadband reaches most homes. More residents work from home than drive to work.
Norwood Junction is the district's main station, just off the High Street, and it has direct trains into central London. Selhurst, Anerley and Thornton Heath are close enough to act as back-ups, and East Croydon and West Croydon are short hops down the line. Even so, only about 12% of working residents commuted by train at the 2021 Census, the same share as went by bus. The bus network has 110 stops in and around the district, and the national public transport access node data, which is current, gives each one an average of 285 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 15 buses in the peak hour. Every stop has a weekend service. That counts departures, not routes, and departures are what decide whether you wait at a stop.
At the 2021 Census about 37% of working residents worked from home, about 23% drove, about 4% walked and about 2% cycled. About 41% of households have no car and about 15% have two or more. A district with this much rail chose the laptop first and the car second, and the train still came behind both.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, modelled averages for the area from 2019, put the nearest town centre about 8 minutes away by car, 10 by bike, 13 by public transport and 14 on foot. With a walk only a few minutes slower than the bus, the town centre is effectively on the doorstep.
The same 2019 statistics give a GP about 7 minutes by car and 8 on foot or by public transport, a food store about 6 minutes' walk or 7 by car, and a hospital about 13 minutes by car against about 31 by public transport. The places of work the department counts are about 13 minutes away by public transport and about 18 by car, so this is one of the rare commutes where the car is the slow option. Distances to fixed places do not change, but bus services have been cut in many areas since 2019, so the public transport times are the least reliable figures in that set.
Gigabit-capable broadband is available across about 87% of South Norwood's postcodes, superfast across about 97%, and no postcode falls below the legal minimum service. Mobile coverage is effectively complete, with 4G or 5G available on every network almost everywhere.
The noise is the cost. About 60% of postcodes are near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official mapping treats traffic as a significant noise source, and the loudest band in the area reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source and reaches the same 65-decibel level in about 27% of postcodes, with a top band of 75. The official noise maps can be searched by address, and it takes a minute to see whether a particular house is on a main road, a railway line or neither. The junction that makes the place so useful also makes about a quarter of it loud.
There are 24 public charging sites in and around the district with 36 connections between them, and only 2 of them are rapid. For an electric car, charging here has to be planned.
For a typical commuter this means a short walk to one of several stations and a frequent bus as the fallback, with home working covering the rest of the week. A car is mainly useful for the hospital run and the out-of-town supermarket.
Getting around is one of South Norwood's real strengths. The trains, buses and broadband all deliver, and the price of living next to that much transport is the traffic and train noise.