Do you/have you lived in Ash, Surrey? Is it to be avoided as much as googling suggests?

[Fieldsoftripe9]

Currently living in kingston so a lovely area for schools and just life in general really. We are renting but want to buy. We are pretty much priced out of the area unless we did shared ownership and even then it would only be for a flat. We need to move further out and around ash/aldershot/farnborough is the closest but affordable area for a 3 bed house.

We need to stay commutable to kingston for our jobs so cant move much further out really.

So is Ash etc really as bad as googling leads me to believe? I know they are army towns which is seen as negative but what does this actually mean in residential and social terms? Are people in swastikas driving round in tanks at night shooting people or what? I keep seeing people negatively say they are army towns but I don't actually know what this implies.

I just want my kids to grow up with little garden to play in, go to a nice school with children from ethnically diverse and tolerant families and live in a fairly safe neighbourhood.

Yes Alton is very nice although I think it is also being blighted by identikit housing estates. It's a long (rail) commute to Kingston too.

Don't not do it
I come from ash, I was born there and went to school there
It's not an army town, it's a village just outside of Aldershot which is the army town but the strange thing is that Ash comes under Surrey but the closest town is Aldershot so the council tax gets paid to Surrey but the address comes under Aldershot which is in Hampshire
Ash is a dump, DO NOT MOVE TO WINCHESTER ROAD!!
Winchester road is absolutely full of travellers, they moved them out of government road into Winchester road and it's not somewhere where you want to live and shawfield school is in Winchester road aswell so that is not a school you want to send your kids to
Even the areas around Winchester road you don't want to live either
I would say try Ash Vale, ash vale is abit better, of you try around the train station then it's actually quite nice, you got the canal on the other side of the road and the shooting ranges that is within the common that you can go, there isn't much trouble around ash vale compared to ash
The only problem is that you would have to go to a school in ash which the only secondary school is ash manor which I went to, not a great school when I was there but I've heard it's much much better now
Not to sure on primary school, I went to Ash Grange which was alright but I'm not sure what it's like now