The area around Belvedere is greener than anyone who has only seen the riverside industry would guess. Most front doors are a couple of hundred metres from a park. There are about two dozen green spaces within a kilometre. Water is never far off, with the Thames along the northern edge. The incinerator is on the river, and the parks are everywhere else.
The nearest green space is about 180 metres from the average home, and about 24 green spaces lie within a kilometre. The Green Chain Walk runs along the north side of the ridge towards Erith and joins the Thames Path in three places. The large park in Upper Belvedere has Belvedere Beach, a play area opened in 2017 on the site of the old Victorian paddling pool. It's the only beach on this stretch of the Thames, and it has climbing frames instead of sand.
The nearest water is about 410 metres from the average home, and about 22 bodies of water lie within a kilometre, from the Thames to the ditches and channels of the old marsh. The river here is a working one, with the Crossness sewage works and a waste-to-energy plant on its bank, so the walk along it has more industry than wildlife.
The National Cycle Network is about 1.6 kilometres from the average home, and only about 3% of postcodes are close to it. Cycling into the countryside means a ride out first.
The rated-premises list has 104 shops, 8 pubs and 8 restaurants. Upper Belvedere has most of the pubs and the village shops along Nuxley Road and Woolwich Road. Lower Belvedere is smaller and more industrial, around the station.
Fine-particle pollution across the London Borough of Bexley averaged about 8.5 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024.
The town splits into two parts. Upper Belvedere, up on the ridge with Lessness Heath, has the church, the Victorian and Edwardian villas, the library and the park. Lower Belvedere has the station, a Methodist chapel, a Sikh temple and, past it towards Crossness, the industrial estate and Joseph Bazalgette's Victorian pumping station. Lesnes Abbey is close by to the west. The ridge has views to Canary Wharf, which is quite a thing to be able to see from a semi in Bexley.
Private gardens add about 52,000 square metres of outdoor space for every 1,000 residents. For a place this dense, that's a decent amount of lawn per family, and the gardens up on the ridge are noticeably bigger than the yards in Lower Belvedere. Look at the satellite view of the exact street to see which kind you're buying.
The council's rating list has 447 non-domestic premises. The biggest groups are warehouses and stores at 108 and shops at 104, followed by 59 factory and workshop premises. These are premises on the valuation list, which isn't the same as businesses open and trading today. Belvedere is still a place where things get stored and made, as well as bought.
Of the 114 food premises with a hygiene rating, about 61% have the top score of five and about 10% sit near the bottom. Six in ten kitchens at the top grade is a fair standard for a high street with this many takeaways.
There's no area of outstanding natural beauty, no site of special scientific interest and no ancient woodland officially recorded in Belvedere. The green space is local parks and old heath, and nobody has asked it to be anything more.
The surroundings are one of Belvedere's real strengths. Parks, water and walks are close to almost every home, even with industry along the river.