Edgware is a dense, built-up suburb with parks almost everywhere you turn. There's green space within a couple of minutes' walk of most homes. Brooks and ponds are close by too. The high street is mostly shops, with very few pubs. The countryside gets as close as the Green Belt allows, and no closer.
The average home in Edgware is about 165 metres from public green space, with around 20 green spaces within a kilometre. Edgwarebury Park, a Site of Nature Conservation Interest on the steep northern side, Stoneyfields Park and Canons Park are the main names. Edgware is a suburb of about 9,000 people per square kilometre, and still almost nobody lives more than a short walk from grass.
Water is close as well. The average home is about 320 metres from blue space, with around 34 ponds, brooks and stretches of water within a kilometre. Most of it is small: the Deans Brook, the Edgware Brook and the Edgwarebury Brook running down to the Silk Stream, which heads south towards the Welsh Harp at Brent Reservoir.
Getting further out takes more effort. The nearest stretch of the National Cycle Network is about 8 kilometres away on average, and no postcode in the area is close to it. Given how few people here cycle, that hardly matters. North of the houses, the ground rises towards Brockley Hill, where the Romans made pottery and someone later put up an obelisk to Cassivellaunus. Edgware's past has been less about homes than about making things to sell to people passing through.
Private gardens matter here too. Across the area there are about 55,000 square metres of garden for every 1,000 residents, which, for a place this dense, reflects the interwar semis with their gardens at the back.
The rated-premises data for Edgware counts 689 shops, 29 restaurants and 6 pubs, along with 242 offices. That is a high street built for shopping, not drinking. Six pubs is a small number for a town that once kept coaching inns going all along the Roman road.
On the valuation list, the area has 1,338 rateable business premises. The two biggest groups are 682 premises classed as shops and 222 as offices. These are units on a tax list, and some may be empty or used for something else. In Edgware, the business that runs the whole town is the shop.
The Food Standards Agency has rated 365 premises in Edgware that serve or sell food. About 56% hold the top score of five and about 7% are at the low end of the scale. For a high street this busy, that is a respectable record, though the inspections only check the kitchens and not the cooking.
Across the London Borough of Barnet, fine-particle air pollution averaged about 8.5 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024, measured at council-area level.
The neighbourhood is suburban London at its most typical: Burnt Oak to the south-east, Canons Park and Stanmore to the west, Mill Hill and Elstree beyond, and the Green Belt holding the line to the north. The scheduled monuments are all outside the town, at Brockley Hill and in woodland beside the old Roman road.
Nothing in or around Edgware carries a protected-landscape designation. There is no area of outstanding natural beauty, no site of special scientific interest and no ancient woodland. Its green spaces are local parks and nature sites, for local use.
The surroundings are one of Edgware's real strengths: a park close to almost every door, water nearby, and a high street with everything you need except a choice of pubs.