The area around Milford on Sea is basically a nature reserve that happens to let people live in it. The sea sits close enough to be part of daily life rather than a day out. Green space is everywhere you turn, with the average home a few hundred metres from the nearest patch. The marshes, the spit and the castle are all within reach on foot. This is the Hampshire coast doing the thing it is best at, which is looking like a postcard and charging accordingly.
Green space is not something you go hunting for here so much as something you struggle to avoid. The typical home sits within about seven separate green spaces inside a one-kilometre radius, the nearest of them roughly 325 metres from the front door. Add water to that and the picture tips into genuine abundance: open blue space lies around 200 metres away on average, with dozens of separate stretches of it inside that same short radius. For a village where houses are packed a good deal tighter than the open countryside around it, that is a striking amount of open ground and open water sitting within a walk. Nobody here is short of somewhere to put the dog.
The texture of the place is coast, marsh and sky in roughly equal measure. To the east, Keyhaven runs into the Lymington and Keyhaven nature reserve, a stretch of sea-wall path, salt marsh and shallow bird lakes that draws walkers all year. South of that, Hurst Spit reaches out toward Hurst Castle, with Sturt Pond tucked in behind. Look across the water and the view lands on the Needles and the north-western tip of the Isle of Wight, framed by Christchurch Bay. Inland the surroundings settle into the familiar fringe of villages, Hordle, Everton and Pennington among them, with the larger centres of Lymington and New Milton within easy reach. The everyday amenity holds up better than the sleepy setting might suggest, with around three dozen rated food outlets in the area and roughly eight in ten of them carrying the top five-star hygiene grade. That is the quiet competence of somewhere that lives on regulars rather than passing trade. The overall tone is unhurried, comfortable and firmly grown-up, a place that stopped trying to impress anyone some time ago and is all the better for it.
The verdict is easy and generous. The area around Milford on Sea is close to the best of the Hampshire coast for open space and setting, with the sea, the marsh and the reserve all within a walk and precious little to hold against it. If your idea of a good surrounding is water one way and greenery filling every gap, this is about as good as the mainland gets.