Southwick has its own rail station and gigabit broadband across almost every postcode, which puts it around the middle of the connectivity spectrum for coastal West Sussex. Only about 3% of workers commute by train. About 5% by bus. Almost half drive. Nearly three in ten skip the daily commute altogether by working from home.
Rail leaves from Southwick Rail Station, on the coastal line running through West Sussex. The station has been in place since 1840, when the railway first threaded along the coast, and it still handles the small share of daily travel that a small coastal station handles. Only about 3% of workers use it for the commute, which is what you would expect from a station that has never quite become the main way people leave. Nearby stations widen the picture, with Fishersgate and Portslade sitting to the east and Shoreham-by-Sea to the west, giving flexibility over which train and which station to catch. Hove and Aldrington sit further along the line for anyone needing a different destination or a different service pattern. Buses are the light-footprint layer, with about 76 stops sitting within the town's bounding box, and roughly one in twenty workers uses them to get to work. Neither rail nor bus carries a large share of the daily travel, but both networks are there and work for the households that need them.
Broadband is where the connectivity picture actually gets impressive. Gigabit reaches around 97% of postcodes. Superfast reaches 99%. Nothing meaningful sits below the universal service floor for internet delivery. Whatever you moved here for, video calls will not be what stops you doing it. A small coastal town that missed most of the post-war infrastructure boom got the digital one delivered nearly wall-to-wall, which is the sort of thing worth pausing to notice.
The everyday travel picture is what a small coastal town gets. Town-centre trips take about 10 minutes by car and about 20 by public transport, which is the standard gap between having a car and not. The primary school run averages around 7 minutes by car, the secondary school run closer to 10. Almost half of Southwick drives, so the road network is the real backbone. Cycle and walk shares are small but not nothing, at roughly 4% and 7% respectively. The nearly three-in-ten work-from-home share is the figure that has actually rewritten the connectivity conversation for coastal towns like this. If you do not need to be somewhere specific by 9am, most of the connectivity you need runs through the router rather than the station.
Three out of five is the honest verdict on connectivity. Rail carries a small share, buses a slightly larger one, broadband essentially solved. Enough infrastructure to run a car-lite life for the fifth or so of the town that leans on it, and enough broadband to run a work-from-home life for the three in ten who do. What Southwick does not deliver is the kind of connectivity that would let you build your life around the train station, and what it does deliver is enough to keep the rest of your life moving without much friction.