The area around Brockenhurst is mostly forest, and the forest is firmly in charge. Open green space starts around 240 metres from the average front door. There are roughly ten separate patches of it within a kilometre. Water is barely further, with something like twenty-five streams, ponds or waterways within the same short radius. This is not a village with countryside nearby. It is countryside with a village dropped into the middle of it.
The green access is the headline, and it is close to as good as England offers. With open space a couple of hundred metres away and about ten distinct green spaces inside a kilometre, you do not drive to nature here, you walk out of the back door into it. The blue side matches it, with roughly twenty-six water features within that kilometre and the nearest only around 250 metres off. For anyone who cycles, the national cycle network runs close to about seven in ten postcodes, so the routes out into the forest and toward the coast are on your doorstep rather than a project. The dominant fact of living here is how little effort it takes to be somewhere quiet and green.
Beyond the trees, the character is scattered, moneyed and low-rise. Brockenhurst sits ringed by small settlements and hamlets, Boldre and Pilley and Setley among them, each a cluster rather than a town. Grand houses punctuate the landscape, from Rhinefield House to the parkland of Brockenhurst Park, and the ancient oaks that once hid military vehicles before the wartime landings still define the tree line. For a proper day out you have Beaulieu to the south-east, home to Palace House and the National Motor Museum, while Lyndhurst, Sway and the coastal town of Lymington sit within easy reach for the shops and services the village itself keeps small. On the ground that village offers a handful of pubs and a handful of restaurants, enough to eat and drink well without ever feeling like a place chasing a crowd. The pace is set by the forest, and the forest is not in a hurry.
The blunt verdict is that the surroundings rate near the top, four and a half out of five, and they earn it without trying. If the reason you are looking at Brockenhurst is the setting, the setting will not let you down. You are buying into one of the greenest, most watered, most genuinely rural addresses in the south, and everything else about the place is a footnote to that.