Better than the town it surrounds, and locals will get that across within about a minute. Green space sits roughly a hundred and forty metres from the average front door. Twenty-five patches of it within a kilometre. Water around six hundred metres away. The good part of Andover starts where the pavement gives up.
The nearest green space is about 140 metres from the average postcode here, with roughly 25 separate green spaces inside a kilometre. That is not a park you drive to at the weekend. It is the sort of provision where the dog decides the route and nobody consults a map.
Water is about 580 metres away on average, with roughly 31 stretches of it within a kilometre, which is more riverbank than an inland town usually manages. Andover sits on the River Anton, a tributary of the Test, and the valley does most of the work of making the place look like Hampshire rather than like a plan drawn in the 1960s.
The National Cycle Network runs about 730 metres from the average postcode, and about 44% of postcodes sit close to it, so leaving town under your own power is a real option rather than a line in a leaflet. There is no ancient woodland anywhere in the area.
The valuation list counts 354 shop premises, 55 pubs and 28 restaurants across the area. That ratio is the character in a single line: somewhere that drinks locally, shops locally, and books a table for birthdays.
Fine-particle pollution across the council area averaged about 6 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024. That is a council-wide figure rather than a reading taken outside anyone's window.
The parish names give the game away before the map does: Anna Valley, Little Ann, Penton Mewsey, Red Rice, Wildhern, Palestine. Threaded between them is the older stuff, and there is a surprising amount of it. Balksbury hillfort and Bury Hill camp sit on the town's edges, there is a deserted medieval village at Foxcott, a Roman villa out towards Clanville, and a registered park at Amport. For a place people write off as post-war housing, the ground underneath it has been busy for a very long time.
Private outdoor space is the thing the public figures never cover. Across the area there is roughly 89,000 square metres of private garden per 1,000 residents, which is the measure that actually answers the question: homes here have their own ground rather than a share of a communal lawn.
The rating list holds 1,379 rateable premises in the area, including 303 office premises and 14 holiday lets alongside the shops and pubs. Those are premises on a valuation list rather than businesses trading today, so read them as capacity. The point is that the area has a working spine of offices and units, not a high street and a car park.
Of the 245 food premises carrying a published hygiene rating, about 83% hold the top score and about 2% sit at the bottom of the scale. Which ones is a question the register answers and this page will not.
No part of the area carries a protected-landscape designation. No area of outstanding natural beauty, no site of special scientific interest, no ancient woodland. That absence is worth knowing rather than regretting: this is ordinary working countryside rather than a curated view with a management plan, which is also why the restrictions that come with designation are not part of the conversation here.
The surroundings are the strongest thing Andover has, and unusually for a strength it costs nothing to use: green space within a short walk, water closer than most towns manage, and a ring of villages providing the scenery the town centre never attempted.