Thank you for your post DarloRich, very good to hear your views. I don't wish to hijack the thread for long, but do you know much about any short-term houseshares that I could afford on a £500/month budget?
Most of them - again, MK is still pretty cheap so far as housing in the SE goes, particularly given how nice[1] it is. Have a nose at one of the house share websites and find one that way.
[1] The shopping centre is a bit boring and nondescript, though practical in being easy to park, well-served by buses and having all the shops you'd want. But if you don't like out of town shopping arcades it's easily avoided, just shop online. But MK has a terrible reputation, which always struck me as odd as it's actually a really nice place to live - low density, green, full of parks etc, easy to get around by car and bike (though the bus service is a bit rubbish at times) - maybe to keep prices down we need to maintain the secret
It is worth pointing out that I don't think MK has any rough areas, despite what the locals think. It is a nice, safe, middle class town. Even the lakes, which has a terrible local reputation, is not bad. I have lived in much worse places.
The Lakes isn't really rough, it's basically identical to much of Runcorn - you can walk there at night without getting mugged, and park your car there without it getting nicked, and it does, by design, come with some lovely views of the Brickhills. But don't buy a house there because the flat roofs cause lots of problems with leaks, damp etc (they were designed like that to give every house a view of the Brickhills from upstairs but the technology wasn't quite there). OTOH, Fishermead can be really quite rough and has a bit of a race related problem though again nothing on what you get in parts of the Northern mill towns - that's the one I really would avoid in terms of living there, but I've cycled and walked through it a number of times without issues. (Though being 6' 4" and built like the proverbial does help, so I might not be the best one to make judgements on personal safety).
The rest of it, though it varies in what it looks like and what kind of people you get there, is basically about as middle class and safe as you can get in a large town that is bigger than most actual UK cities. And no, people don't get attacked all the time on the Redways and in the underpasses - they too are very safe - they are much safer than walking across the roads on the level, despite which some still do do the latter, and get themselves killed with quite alarming regularity.
