Depends entirely on whether you own a car, and here you do. Stockbridge is a rural Test Valley town with no railway station inside it, so connectivity means the road first and everything else second. About four in ten residents drive to work, and a similar share have skipped the commute altogether by working from home, which is the pattern of a place where getting anywhere involves a car key. The setting is lovely and the trade-off is real: you buy the quiet by accepting the miles. Anyone expecting to step off a train at the end of the street has come to the wrong town.
Rail is the weak link. There is no station in Stockbridge, so catching a train means driving first to one of the stations ringing the area, among them Winchester, Andover, Micheldever, Dean, Grateley, Shawford, and Mottisfont and Dunbridge. Once you reach the bigger of those you can pick up direct trains to London, but the drive-then-train routine is enough friction that almost nobody bothers day to day, with fewer than one in a hundred residents commuting by rail. Buses are thinner still. The wider area counts around 460 bus stops scattered across the town and its villages, yet barely anyone relies on them to get to work, which tells you the timetable suits errands more than commutes. Public transport here is a backup, not a plan.
Broadband does more to connect the place than the roads or rails manage. Gigabit-capable connections reach about half of properties, and superfast service stretches to roughly eight in ten, so the home office that so many people here run actually works. In a town this far from a platform, the internet is the commute for a large chunk of residents, and it holds up better than the transport links do.
For a typical working week that shapes things clearly. If you drive, the nearest town centre is around twenty minutes away by car, and the road network gets you to the motorway and the bigger stations without drama. If you do not drive, life gets harder, because the bus will not reliably do the heavy lifting and the train is a car journey away before it is a train. The people who thrive here are the ones who either work from home or treat a car as a given, and everyone else spends longer planning journeys than making them.
The verdict is middling and entirely honest about itself. Stockbridge is fine if you drive and frustrating if you do not, with good broadband papering over patchy public transport. Well connected for a car, poorly connected without one, and squarely average once you average the two.