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[sueenglish]

Hi again

I have to support the posts about a car. You'd spend half your life in a traffic jam. You can get buses or cycle or walk much more easily! Easy to get trains to London. Even if you bought a car it would be parked up a lot!

[runwithscissors]

Chime on the car thing. When I lived in Cambridge (briefly) I used begrudge the amount of car traffic trying to wend its way through the (albeit slightly weird) one way system. A car is a headache in town, plus its proximity to London means you can get a train pretty much anywhere in the UK without too much hassle. As for the £30k - I'm also on the same postdoc salary (pretty much all postdocs now have the same salary range in the UK) and my partner is working part time in a non-academic job (which pays roughly £10k). We live quite well on that but don't have children. If employment is really bad in Cambridge, your SO could work in London (which is 50 miles away) and you could both live in between. Stevenage is an ok place to live....

[skyrock]

The city centre is off limits to private vehicles during the day unless you have a special permit.

You can get a rental flat for the range of £1,000 pounds (+/- 200) per month, withholding taxes and national insurance should take about 20-25% off your monthly salary. Your monthly food and misc bills would probably come up to £400-500 per person (depending on your lifestyle obviously). The housing prices are just a notch lower than London but don't expect living expenses to be a lot cheaper. Obviously the job market now is quite bleak but it's not impossible to get work perhaps just longer.