Before Ancestry and similar online resources were available, I used to travel to London (from Sussex) to consult the Public Records Office (then in Holborn) for census data, and the Births, Marriages & Deaths ledgers in St. Katharine's House in the Strand. I would buy car parking/train/tickets/food/drinks and - if I was lucky after a day trawling through microfilm or hoiking heavy books on and off shelves - to come away with perhaps 3 or 4 useful items of data.

I now pay my sub (£8.99 a month) to Ancestry. Since doing that for the last 2 years or so, I've amassed huge quantities of data from all the censuses from 1841 to (now) 1911, and from the online BMD indexes. When I add to that the free stuff like the International Genealogical Index data, the FreeBMD data (to which I used to contribute) and other online resources, I've done more and faster research in the last few years than in the whole of the previous 20 years. So, all in all, it's worth it - and the time I might have spent just travelling to London has been spent on driving to those excellent record offices and getting access to a whole range of interesting documents.

Number of records gained from 1911 census data so far - at a cost of £25 (still got some credits) - census data for 26 addresses and 156 individuals. So, yes, the 1911 data is expensive and yes, I hope it gets into Ancestry one day, but it's saved me a huge amount of time and other expense to get the information I need now. You gets what you pays for!