Lee has more green space within reach than most people would expect so close to central London. The average home is a couple of minutes' walk from a green space. Dozens more lie within a kilometre. Water is a short stroll away. The high street is mostly shops, with very few pubs.
Across Lee, the nearest green space is about 120 metres from the average home, and there are around 32 within a kilometre. Manor House Gardens, once the grounds of the old manor, is the best known, and Horn Park has a public park of its own at the Eltham end. Greenwich Park, Well Hall Pleasaunce and Grove Park Cemetery are all listed among the larger green spaces nearby. Few homes here are more than a short walk from a patch of grass.
The nearest water is about 390 metres from the average home, and around 26 bodies of water lie within a kilometre. The River Quaggy flows north through Horn Park and on towards Lewisham. For much of its length the Quaggy is out of sight, so the water a buyer is most likely to see on a walk is the pond in a park.
The National Cycle Network is about 2.9 kilometres from the average home, and no postcodes in Lee are close to a route. Cycling here means using ordinary roads, and the dedicated routes start a few kilometres away.
The local business rates list records 388 rateable premises in Lee, which counts properties on the valuation list and not businesses that are currently open. That includes 172 shop premises, 35 offices, 7 pubs and 7 restaurants. So the high street is mainly for shopping, and the places to eat and drink are few. Lee Green Farm stood from the 1660s roughly where the Leegate shopping centre is now. The farmland became a shopping centre, and the change from fields to retail is more or less the story of the area.
Of Lee's 99 food premises inspected for hygiene, about 76% hold the top rating of five, and about 2% are at the bottom of the scale. Hygiene ratings measure kitchens and cleanliness, not cooking, but they show the local takeaways are generally well run.
Fine-particle air pollution across the London Borough of Lewisham averaged 9 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024. That is a borough-wide figure, so it says nothing about a particular street.
Lee is built around its station, Burnt Ash Hill and the crossroads at Lee Green, with Blackheath to the north, Eltham to the east and Grove Park to the south. Most of it is a mix of terraces, post-war houses and flats, with parks and gardens filling the gaps between them. It is a residential area, and most people head into town for nights out.
Private gardens add plenty on top of the parks. Across Lee there are about 63,000 square metres of private garden for every 1,000 residents, enough that many houses here have a real garden as well as a park down the road. Flats will have less, so check the plan of a particular property for the size and orientation of its outside space.
No area of outstanding natural beauty, site of special scientific interest or ancient woodland overlaps Lee. The green space here is municipal and domestic: parks, cemeteries, playing fields and back gardens, all maintained by people, with no protected wild land.
The surroundings are one of Lee's real strengths. It has parks at the end of most roads and gardens behind many front doors, which is more space than most areas this close to central London manage.