The area around Datchet is green, wet and royal. Parks are a short walk from most front doors. Water is closer still. Windsor Great Park and the royal gardens fill the view across the river. For a village with a commuter's habits, it has a landowner's surroundings.
Green space is close at hand. The nearest public green space is on average about 240 metres from a home in the Datchet area, and a typical home has about 10 within a kilometre. Nobody here has to put the dog in the car.
Water is even nearer. The nearest river, lake or other open water is on average about 180 metres away, with about 61 bodies of water within a kilometre of a typical home. The Thames, its backwaters and the old gravel lakes towards Wraysbury make a waterside walk the default rather than the outing, and the Environment Agency has spent a good deal of mapping time on all that water too.
Getting further out by bike takes a short ride. The nearest stretch of the National Cycle Network is on average about 1.4 kilometres away, and only about 6% of postcodes are close to it. There is no ancient woodland in the area.
The rated-premises count across the surrounding area lists 502 shops, 42 pubs and 23 restaurants, which is a high street and a fair share of the next town's as well. Food hygiene inspectors have rated 53 food outlets, and about 81% hold the top score.
Air quality is reasonable. Windsor and Maidenhead recorded average fine-particle pollution of about 7.4 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024, a figure for the whole council area.
The character comes from what surrounds the village. Across the river are the Home Park and Windsor Castle, Frogmore Gardens and Windsor Great Park, with the Savill Garden and Valley Gardens further south and Runnymede, with the Kennedy Memorial landscape, downstream. Ditton Park and Herschel Park, once Upton Park, are to the north. The scheduled remains of Ankerwyke Priory, a Benedictine nunnery with its moat and fishponds, and the moated manor and Queen Victoria's landing stage at Old Windsor are within reach along the river. Horton and Wraysbury are the neighbouring villages, and the airport is never far from the conversation. Most villages would put up a sign for one of those, and Datchet has them all within a few miles of a parish boundary nobody remembers.
Homes have room outside as well. The Datchet area has about 193,000 square metres of private garden for every 1,000 residents, a measure of how much outdoor space people actually own. With that much garden at home and a royal park across the water, residents are rarely short of somewhere to sit outside.
The valuation list gives a sense of what the village itself is made of. Within the Datchet area there are 275 rateable premises, the largest groups being 62 shops, 40 offices and 39 industrial units, with 17 warehouses behind them. These are premises on the list for business rates, which counts buildings and leaves out whether anyone is trading inside.
For eating out, about 81% of the 53 food premises rated by inspectors hold the top hygiene score, and about 4% are at the bottom end of the scale. That is a clean record for a village where the pub and the takeaway are most of the choice.
The area has no protected landscape designation over it, no area of outstanding natural beauty, no site of special scientific interest and no ancient woodland. Its green space is parkland, royal estate and river meadow, protected by ownership and history rather than by official landscape designation.
The surroundings are the best thing about Datchet, a village with parks, gardens and open water within a few minutes of almost every front door and one of the grandest landscapes in the country across the river.