The area around Kentish Town is the best thing about living there. The average front door is about 90 metres from green space. There are around 65 green spaces within a kilometre. Hampstead Heath is up the road. For a place this packed, there is a surprising amount of open ground.
Kentish Town's homes are, on average, about 92 metres from the nearest green space, with around 65 green spaces within a kilometre. Gospel Oak backs onto the southern edge of Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill. Dartmouth Park borders Highgate Cemetery, with Waterlow Park and Kenwood a little further north. Karl Marx moved into Grafton Terrace in 1856 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, so of all Kentish Town's residents he travelled the shortest distance in the end.
Open water is a short walk away. The nearest is about 920 metres from the average home, and there are around 6 bodies of water within a kilometre.
Organised cycling is further off. The nearest stretch of the National Cycle Network is about 5.5 kilometres away on average, and 0% of the area is close to it. Getting out into the open here means walking to the Heath, and cycling routes take more finding.
The high street is built for staying local. The rated-premises records for Kentish Town list 290 shops, 21 pubs and 25 restaurants. Kentish Town Road was once a main route out of London to the north, and the shops along it still serve people passing through as well as people who live here. One of the area's pubs traded as the Oxford Tavern until 2023, in a grid of streets named after Christ Church, Oxford. That gives the place an unusually academic street map for its high street.
Camden as a whole recorded fine-particle pollution of about 9.5 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024.
Kentish Town has the look and layout of a nineteenth-century railway suburb. There are Victorian terraces, estates such as Holly Lodge and the Bartholomew Estate, and railway lines cutting through the middle. In 1901 it was the "healthful suburb dear to the heart of the piano maker", and the street plan still shows that age. Tufnell Park, Highgate and Camden Town border it, and each is close enough to walk to for a change of scene.
Private outdoor space is limited. Kentish Town has about 18,400 square metres of garden for every 1,000 residents, in an area where most homes are flats. A garden is often a shared patch behind a converted house, a balcony, or nothing at all. If a flat comes with a garden, read the lease to find out whether it is yours alone or shared with every other flat in the building.
Business premises are spread through the area. Kentish Town has 895 rateable premises on the valuation list. Shops are the largest group, and offices come next at 209. These are premises on the rating list, which is not the same as businesses currently trading.
Kentish Town eats out reasonably safely. Of the 238 food premises with a hygiene rating, about 60% hold the top score of five and about 10% sit at the low end of the scale.
No protected-landscape designation overlaps Kentish Town. There is no area of outstanding natural beauty, no site of special scientific interest and no ancient woodland. The countryside here is a city park, and the Heath does that job without a designation.
The surrounding area is one of Kentish Town's real strengths. Hampstead Heath, the cemetery and the parks are all close to the front door.