Hatfield is far greener than a post-war New Town has any right to be. The nearest park is a couple of minutes from most front doors. There are dozens more within a kilometre. Water is a short walk away. Two stately parks sit on the edges, and the town was planned with its open space drawn in from the start.
The average Hatfield home has a green space about 134 metres away and around 29 within a kilometre. Those trees and open spaces were part of the original New Town design, laid out by the development corporation after the war, so the green here is the plan working as intended, seventy-odd years on.
Water is about 400 metres from the average home, with around 15 bodies of water within a kilometre. The best-known stretch is the lake at Brocket Hall, which comes with its own listed bridge.
The National Cycle Network is about 380 metres away on average, and about 72% of the area's postcodes are close to it. That puts a signed route out of town within reach of most homes, towards Welwyn Garden City and the villages around Lemsford and Essendon.
Hatfield's rated premises include 394 shops, 34 pubs and 39 restaurants. That is a working town's high street, built around everyday shopping more than evenings out, with the pubs outnumbering nothing much.
Fine-particle air pollution across Welwyn Hatfield averaged about 8 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024, the council-wide figure for the year.
The character of the area comes from three layers in close quarters. Old Hatfield, the town that grew up around the gates of Hatfield House, keeps its conservation area and its church on the hill. The New Town spreads out beyond the railway, with modernist 1950s housing and the University of Hertfordshire. Around the edge are parkland and villages: Brocket Hall near Lemsford, North Mymms Park, the Old Mill House Museum and Mill Green Mill at Mill Green, and Essendon to the east. Legend has Elizabeth I learning she was queen while sitting under an oak in Hatfield Park, which remains the most consequential thing ever to happen to anyone resting under a tree in Hertfordshire.
Private gardens are generous for a town this dense. Hatfield has about 71,000 square metres of garden for every 1,000 residents, which reflects post-war plots laid out when the planners still assumed every family wanted a lawn to mow.
The valuation list holds 869 rateable premises across the area, with offices and shops at the top of the list, followed by warehouses and industrial units. These are premises on the rating list, which includes some standing empty, so they describe the town's commercial bones more than what is open today. The offices and sheds are mostly where the aircraft factory used to be, and the town now works in the buildings that replaced it.
Food hygiene ratings are solid. Of 186 rated food premises in Hatfield, about 74% hold the top score of five, and about 2% are rated at the low end.
No area of outstanding natural beauty, site of special scientific interest or ancient woodland overlaps Hatfield. The green here is the managed kind, parks, playing fields and the parkland of the big estates, which suits a town that was designed down to its grass verges.
Few New Towns can claim surroundings this good, and Hatfield's green space, water and parkland are the part of the place that needs no defending.