The area around Peckham is green, busy and very close to the front door, and that combination is the district's best feature. The average home is a short stroll from a park. Dozens of green spaces fall within a kilometre. The high street is mostly shops. There is no countryside to speak of, and nobody moving here should want any.
On average a Peckham home is about 100 metres from the nearest public green space, and about 63 green spaces lie within a kilometre of it. Anyone in Peckham who claims to have nowhere to run is not looking very hard.
Water is further off. The nearest blue space is about 900 metres from the average home, and about 6 water features of one kind or another lie within a kilometre.
The National Cycle Network is about 1.2 kilometres from the average home, and about 21% of postcodes are close to it. There is no ancient woodland in the district.
Peckham has 741 shops on the rated-premises list, against 27 pubs and 37 restaurants. Going by that list, Peckham buys things far more often than it sits down to eat or drink them.
Southwark as a whole recorded fine-particle pollution of about 9.5 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024.
The district's name is a guide to its layout. Peckham Rye comes from an Old English word for a stream, and today the stream is gone and the name belongs to a park, a station and a lane. Peckham Rye Park is the big open space, Nunhead Cemetery is the green space at the Nunhead end, and Rye Lane and Peckham Hill Street are both conservation areas. Further afield, Dulwich Park and Southwark Park are within reach for a change of scenery. Nunhead's best-known green space is a cemetery, and its permanent residents are the only people in the district who never mention the buses.
Private gardens add up to about 20,000 square metres for every 1,000 residents, measured across all 43 of the district's neighbourhood areas. That is a figure for the whole population, and in a district made mostly of flats, the parks do the work a back garden does in the suburbs.
The valuation list has 1,977 rateable business premises in Peckham. Shops are the largest category at 733, offices run to 239, and an industrial category comes next with 297. Those are premises on the list, some of them empty at any given moment.
Of 504 food premises rated for hygiene, about 62% hold the top score of five and about 5% sit at the bottom end.
No area of outstanding natural beauty, site of special scientific interest or ancient woodland overlaps Peckham. Its nature comes with benches and bins, and it is all the more used for it.
The surroundings are one of Peckham's real strengths: a park within sight of most doors, a cemetery quiet enough to walk in, and a high street that has kept its shops.