Hi. Would appreciate your advice on picking a town in the South East to live in. There's me, DH, DD1 (nearly 3) and DD2 (9 months).
We currently live in Town A. It's a medium sized town with the usual selection of shops etc, and it has a leisure centre and quite a few parks etc for the kids. There's been a lot of housing developments around here recently though and local services (GPs, schools etc) are getting really stretched. Public transport links aren't great (no train station, just some buses). The town is pretty 'patchy' with some areas being quite nice, and others being quite deprived (sadly we currently live in quite a deprived area). The local primary schools are a bit of a lottery. A couple are pretty good, but several are pretty poor (we currently live nearest two very poor ones). There is however a good nursery here for the girls which also offers a pre and post school club (and does drop offs / pick ups) and a holiday club for kids attending 3 of the local primary schools, which would be really helpful for our childcare needs when I'm back to work after mat leave.
Town B is the neighbouring town. It's smaller and doesn't have as much to do (smaller high street, only one park) but it is a much quieter, safer town too. There is a big town only about 10 mins drive away though. The local primary school is excellent, and because it's the only primary school in town (and they are currently starting to expand it) it's almost certain the DDs would go to this school if we lived here. It's got a train station in town too with direct services to London (just over an hour away) which could really benefit DH in the future as there's better work opportunities for him if he was to commute to London, and there's also easier access to major roads etc from here. There's no nursery in town though so we would have to drive back and forth to our current nursery each day (about a 15 minute drive). The DDs wouldn't be able to use the pre/after school club at the nursery either if we lived here as their school isn't one that the nursery school club serves, but the school does do a good breakfast / after-school club in term time, but there's no immediately obvious childcare solution in the holidays. This town is a bit more expensive to live in, (so it's probably about 15-20k more per house than an equivalent house in town A) so we wouldn't get as much house for our money.
DH wants to move to town B. I'm a bit on the fence as they both have positives and negatives. Would appreciate some unbiased opinions!