Thanks for the helpful responses all.
@Bill N , I knew there was some level of etiquette regarding the use of public chargers, but playing devil's advocate, and most definitely not wanting to cause any upset, I wouldn't want to become a pariah just because I wanted to use one of these.
My trip this week has involved parking overnight in Westfield Shopping Centre on Tuesday and my experience yesterday morning; all the spots I visited this morning were empty, and there is a bank of either 8 or 12 charging points in Westfield, none of which were in use (and there were quite a few PHEVs & BEVs parked in normal bays).
The infrastructure has to be made available to everyone - I don't want to deny a BEV driver the ability to charge, but if I have the option to do a worthwhile charge (not 30 minutes giving me a couple of miles of range), I want to do that without being damned for it 😊 Overnight stays at hotels I most definitely want to charge it!
That being said, I won't need to worry that much due to the limits of the car's charging time;
@donald it's limited to 3.6kw, and has the same 218ps drivetrain as per the Passat GTE, rather than the 245ps as found on the new Golf GTE/Octavia vRS/Cupra Leon. I plugged it in on the granny cable last night, and the app indicated 5:20 hours to fully charge, which the app duly notified me when it was full as expected!
I do often have meetings that last a few hours, so could charge it fully on public charger, or at a customer's - I should have asked the customer I was with all day on Wednesday if I could plug the car into their mains, as they were showing me the initiatives they're taking to go carbon neutral, and I'm sure would have been more than happy to give me some battery power!
@Spiny , thanks for the names of the charging providers. Knowing that there are Tesla chargers available is good; going back to Westfield, there were a lot of Tesla Superchargers being used, and I did have look on the empty unit to see if it had any pay option for a non-Tesla to use, which it didn't.
@gladini , thanks for the hints on driving the VAG car specifically. I've been using the inbuilt nav when driving, as the manual says the car shuffles between the EV and electric modes automatically. On Monday I did a 300-mile round trip to Devon, and the car acted as expected, starting the journey in EV, switching between EV and ICE on the motorway and switching back to EV on the final part of my urban journey, leaving the battery almost empty when I arrived.
Regarding your comment about the car's economy when the battery hits zero. I did notice a few times on the journey back home yesterday that the car was getting a little bit of battery regeneration and switching to EV everyone and then. Surely this can't be good for the engine, as it was switching on and off with gentle throttle...does the engine get preheated at all? I'm thinking about a situation whereby you've driven entirely on EV and you're on the motorway at 70mph when the ICE kicks in and it's cold; from a mechanical point of view, that feels to me like it's putting a cold engine under a lot of stress and wear!
Unfortunately, I've been using Google maps via CarPlay for the past couple of years in my previous car, so the inbuilt nav in the Arteon is somewhat backwards by comparison! Apple Maps integrates with the car and displays route directions on the dashboard, so I'm going to experiment with that and see if the drivetrain changes as expected. If not, it's no hardship to change it manually.
Thankfully the majority of personal journeys are within the car's EV range, so I intend to charge it religiously when at home.
Thanks so much again for all your comments, it's been a great help so far.
Nick