Where is the best place to live in the SouthEast, near London?
Have been looking for a decent place to live, commutable to London for years but have not been successful in finding somewhere
I currently live near Ealing, easy enough to cycle to work or get the tube/train in but its pullution belt, jam city, with noise of the planes and isnt what I wanted out of life
Main criteria
Has to be commutable into the centre of London - ideally by fast train as Tubes too slow
Has to be within driving distance of Heathrow as I do a lot of Global travel
Ideally outside the M25 as I like the country and would love my 2 kids to grow up outside of a pulluted traffic jam packed City
Would be great to have a nice pub (or more nearby)
Nice schools
Not stupidly priced so again pretty much rules out a lot of places
Have driven around a lot of areas for many years.
We liked Richmond and Petersham but they are within the M25, traffice jam hell and way, way overpriced - Petersham is much nicer than Richmond but becomes a nightmare if you need to commute into London
Then we looked at Windsor - no decent train links
Then Gerrards Cross - no centre - nothing there, whats all the fuss about, soul-less place
Beaconsfield - much, much better, but very expensive and the housing crash hasnt effected them at all
We've driven all over the areas of Jordans, Chalfont st Peter, Chalfont st giles, they all seem to be missing things
Then theres Rickmansworth - if anyone has ever been to the centre they can just put high walls around it and call it a Prison
Amersham - we were going to move there a few years ago but then we didnt really like the new town bit on the hill and the old town is mostly a hospital and Tescos!
Then we started to go further afield to places like St Albans and found the traffic even worse than were we currently live, housing crap and way, way overpriced and another souless place
Nicest place we've seen is Berkhamsted lately - west of a certain dump, but its got loads of pubs, restaurants, old ruins of a castle and a fast train link in..... but even so far out of London the prices are still high - typically a decent 4 bed is £1m plus (I mean decent not box rooms with no rear garden to speak of)
The above are all personal opinions - if you live in the above dont get overly offended as the intention is not to do so...... I am just looking for a nice place to live but after years of looking simply cant find somewhere to move to that ticks all the right boxes