Online, very well. On the ground, only by car. There is no station in the village. Six in ten commuters drive. The broadband is better than the buses. Whitehill is wired for working from the spare room and built for driving everywhere else.
Rail barely figures. The nearest station named in the local records is Liphook Rail Station, outside the village, and under 1% of working residents commute by train. Buses do slightly better on paper, with 32 stops across the area, but only about 1% of commuters use them to get to work. Trains and buses together move fewer Whitehill commuters than the ones who walk.
The real commute looks like this. About 59% of working residents drive, and around 27% work from home, which makes the home office the second-busiest route to work in the parish. Around 6% walk and about 1% cycle. Car ownership follows the same logic: only about 9% of households have no car, and about 56% have two or more. A second car here is not a luxury. It is the thing that stops one partner being stranded until six o'clock.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, which are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door, put the nearest town centre about 19 minutes away by car and about 35 by public transport. By bike it is about 45 minutes. On foot it is about 111 minutes, which is less a walk than an expedition, and that number is the finding in itself.
The same statistics cover everyday trips. A GP is about 10 minutes by car, 17 by public transport or 29 on foot. A food store is about 9 minutes by car or 25 on foot. Employment centres are about 19 minutes by car and 31 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier: around 100 minutes by public transport, and a long drive even by car. The public transport figures date from 2019 and bus services change, so treat them with more caution than the car and walking times, which depend on distance and not on a timetable.
The buses that do run are a real service rather than a gesture. Each stop averages about 86 scheduled departures on a weekday, peak hours bring about two buses an hour, and 100% of stops have some weekend service. That is enough to get somewhere, provided somewhere is on the route and the return journey has been checked before leaving.
Broadband is where Whitehill stops apologising. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 82% of premises, superfast about 99%, and 0% fall below the universal service minimum. The fibre made it here even if the trains did not. Mobile coverage matches it: 100% of the area gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and about 99% from all of them, so the choice of network is a matter of price rather than signal.
The cost of all that driving shows up as noise. Every postcode in Whitehill, 100% of them, sits near road noise at or above 65 decibels, the level official noise mapping treats as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels or more along the busiest stretches. Rail noise does not register at all, which is the one advantage of having no railway. How loud any individual house is depends on its position and glazing, so a viewing at rush hour tells a buyer more than the map.
Electric car owners get four public charge points with 15 connectors between them, and only one of those connectors is rapid. That makes charging something to plan around a home driveway rather than something to fit into a trip to the shops.
For a typical commute, the arithmetic is simple. Anyone working from home or driving to work will find Whitehill easy. Anyone relying on a train will find it a daily negotiation with a station outside the village and a bus to reach it.
Whitehill's connectivity is poor for anyone without a car and good for anyone with a router. It is the weakest part of the case for living here, rescued mainly by the number of people who no longer have to leave the house to go to work.