The best bit of living in this particular area, I find, are the access to main routes. The M4 leading west (Bristol etc) and east (London) is on the doorstep, the A414 is within breathing distance and this takes you to the Cotswolds within 25 minutes and a good access point for reaching the North West of England.
The other big benefit of living here are the walkable countryside areas. Coate Water is a 10 minute walk, and this is probably one of Swindon’s best selling points.
The worst part of living here is easily the lack of facilities. It’s a 10 minute drive to get anything – shopping, coffee etc. I mean you can go in multiple directions, but each takes 10 minutes. The east of Swindon is ripe for a Costa or something!
Please review your development:
Overall Badbury Park is a nice place to live and care was taken – originally – with the look and feel of the site. You can go for nice walks around the estate leading into local parkland.
However a few things have let it down of more recent years:
1) no bins; anywhere! This is a huge site, why no bins?
2) A huge lack of any facilities. The site has been here for 8 years, we are finally just getting a new co-op and maybe one other other small shop!
3) The continuation to make the site even bigger. I never imagined we’d still be living on a building site here. I appreciate the need for more homes, but they should have better organised access onto site, as it still means lorries are tearing down the main (and only) access points.
4) Parking, road size, and road safety. They’ve given little, to-no, thought about any of the three.
5) Lastly, I think the biggest issue – which will continue to be a problem, long term – is the lack of site accessibility. The site is becoming huge, covering a mile or two. There are two entrances right next to each other. The site needs to be connected to the rest of Swindon at the other end of the project, otherwise it’s going to cause a nightmare.
The build itself of where we live is ok. Persimmon get a bad rep, but it’s bricks and water! I don’t see the value of a Redrow house (also on site), sure they look nicer from the outside, but the build quality isn’t hugely different (for £100k more). Big downsides with Persimmon has been around some awful design with the kitchen, meaning we are having to rip it out and start again 5 years on. The other big problem, which you always hear with newbuilds is storage. Why haven’t they worked this out yet? Surely the houses will be easier to sell?!
Personally, I wasn’t massively sold on new build before I bought here, as I’d like more open space and to feel less overlooked. This remains the case – probably enhanced by the lockdowns. We won’t be moving any time soon, but it won’t be our final resting place!
Please share one thing (or more) which you wish you had known before you moved in:
I think I wish I had known to be more ruthless with the builder about things we wanted changed, fixed or adapted. Things are starting to go wrong (not huge issues) with things I think I should have pushed for more at the time of first moving in. At the time it is so stressful and you just want to settle, but you really do need to push for things if they are not quite right as they can come back to bite you.
How has the building management responded to any problems or issues you have raised:
They were quite quick to respond, or at least not awful. One thing which is always funny is the team they send out to fix the job are always 10000% better than the ones they had in originally to do the job. False economy at it’s finest!
