The area around Peacehaven is unusually rich for the price of the town it circles. Green space sits about 210 metres from the average front door. There are around eleven greenspaces within a kilometre. None of the town's postcodes sits inside an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty or Site of Special Scientific Interest boundary. The good stuff is next door, not underfoot.
On green space, the numbers are the kind that most English towns would take. The average distance from a front door to a formal or informal green space is around 210 metres, which is a short walk. There are on average around eleven greenspaces within a kilometre of the town's postcodes, which is more than most inland towns of this size can offer. The Dell, near the coast road, doubles as a green space and as the venue for the town's carnival and its various summer events. The seafront, at the base of the chalk cliffs the town sits on, adds a two-directional coastal walk that most towns would have wrapped a paid car park around by now.
For character, the surrounding area is a mix of chalk downland, small Sussex villages and one working port town. Newhaven sits directly to the east, with its harbour and its port-town character. Saltdean sits to the west, along with East Saltdean, Telscombe Cliffs and Peacehaven Heights, all technically distinct settlements that have merged into a continuous coastal strip. Inland, the small villages of Telscombe Village, Piddinghoe and Rodmell are tucked into folds of the downland, each with its own conservation-area status and each about as different from central Peacehaven as it is possible to be within a five-mile radius. Scheduled Bronze Age bowl barrows on Peacehaven Heights, Telscombe Tye and Itford Hill tell you the ridges around here have been walked on since long before anyone thought to build a town at the bottom. Down at the coast, the Prime meridian obelisk on the cliff top marks the point where the meridian crosses the English coast, which is a landmark most Peacehaven residents can point out on request. Blue space, meaning the Channel, sits about 440 metres from the average postcode, which is walking distance if you count the stairs down the cliff face.
Overall, Peacehaven scores four-and-a-half out of five on the quality of what is around it. The town itself is post-war and functional, and the setting it sits in is the reason a lot of buyers put up with the town.