Today we trekked to Letchworth and spent the day there. I’ve mentioned Letchworth before, the “garden city,” it’s one stop north of Hitchin on the Cambridge line. It has an interesting history, though I’ll leave it up to Wikipedia and various other sites to document the details.

What I have to say about it is: we’re keen on it. We’ve now seen Stevenage, Hitchin, and Letchworth close-up and have a good feeling for these original three moving options. Stevenage is out, we were very disappointed by both the old and new town centres. Picking between Hitchin and Letchworth is difficult though, they’re very different places. The main drawback of Hitchin is that it there is a 15 minute walk between the town centre and the rail station, which significantly limits the viable housing locations (must be somewhere between the two, essentially a 7.5-minute-radius circle.) In Letchworth the train station is central so the viable area is a 15-minute-radius circle around the town centre.

In a practical sense there isn’t much else to differentiate the two towns. They both have a large number of shops. Hitchin has, perhaps, a few more choices for the same things. Letchworth has a much larger supermarket, though we do try to avoid the things. They both have butchers that look good (judged by ample advertising of game being available on-season), acceptable coffee places, and some central green-space. Hitchin is much more historic, while Letchworth is greener and more open. This latter point is is probably Letchworth’s main attraction aside from the better transport arrangement. Hitchin’s opposing next-best major attraction is the large and regular market (3 days a week.) As far as the market goes though, Hitchin is only a 5 minute train ride away followed by a 15 minute walk (weekend trains seem to be every 30 minutes.)

Coffee is at least a little important of course. In Hitchin we didn’t see anything much in the way of coffee places other than Starbucks… could be worse. In Letchworth the only chain place we saw was Costa, which is about the same as Starbucks as far as espresso goes — the huge bonus of the Letchworth Costa is free wifi (Starbucks has wifi but it is stupidly expensive for casual use.) Neither of these options are really great on the espresso scale and won’t make up for the loss of Rickmansworth’s Cinnamon Square and Coffee Cube goodness. So, using Costa-wifi, we hunted down other coffee places. We found a couple of promising options and gave them a try (we actually found 3 but the 3rd seemed to not do coffee at all, that’s the ‘net for you.) The first seemed promising but turned out to be terrible, ick. The second didn’t seem promising, we thought we’d found a “caff”, but turned out to be surprisingly good. This latter place was Moon’s Café in “The Arcade” off Letchworth’s main drag “Leys Avenue.”

No doubt we haven’t tried all the coffee places in town. Also, according to the sites above and one of the agents we spoke with today, there are big plans for the “café culture” in Letchworth. Well, that remains to be seen and I can’t imagine it’ll be seen in a hurry. Promising though, the plans for the town centre do look good.

Some other differences include:

• Rent is lower in Letchworth, maybe about 100 quid difference between equivalent places.
• Despite being one stop further away from London, Letchworth has a slightly faster train service to Kings Cross. A 25-minute no-stop train every hour.
• Real estate agents are friendlier, that’s probably just luck though. We dealt with 2 very pleasant agents today (Country Properties and Willows), but in Hitchin spoke with 4 that were either indifferent or even bordering on hostile and 1 that was very good (Norgans).

On the topic of agents, I’ve got all the way to here without mentioning how we went with looking for places today! The summary is: so/so. We looked at two places. The first was about 15 minutes walk from the station (our limit) and can best be described as “poky.” It also smelt of cigarette smoke, a smell you generally have to replace the carpet and repaint to get rid of. The second place was an apartment, shitty kitchen, no outdoors space, and on the ground floor. In other words: the exact opposite of what we’re looking for (we only looked at it because it was on the way back from the previous one.) The only thing these two places had going for them was price, one was a full £400 a month less than our current rent – for good reason though.

It’s not all bad, there are two decent looking options but one requires 24 hours notice before inspection and the other isn’t ready for inspection yet. Hopefully I’ll be able to arrange to see them sometime next week. They’re both semi-detached and available in the right time-frame. One is more central being only 2 minutes from the shopping area and 10 from the station (opposite side of shopping area.) The other is a bit further out, 15 minutes from both the shops and the station. However this latter one seems nigh on luxurious and, on paper, seems to be our pick.

In the end I think we’ll be focusing on Letchworth for our move, it’s far easier to target just one town. Time is ticking away, it’s now less than a month before we have to be out of our current place.