Green, wet in places and full of grand houses you can visit but not afford. Most homes have a park or a patch of green within a short walk. Water is closer still. The pubs outnumber the restaurants. It is proper countryside, and no official landscape designation has ever been stuck on it.
Green space is easy to get to. The average home in the Pulborough area is about 360 metres from its nearest green space, with about 8 green spaces within a kilometre. A dog walk here doesn't need the car.
Water is even closer. The average home sits about 275 metres from the nearest river, stream, pond or lake, with about 26 of them within a kilometre. The Arun and the Rother run through the area, and Stopham Bridge still carries the road over the Arun.
The National Cycle Network is further off, about 8 kilometres from the average home, and no postcodes in the area lie close to a route. Cyclists here ride country lanes and share them with tractors.
The local offer runs more to pubs than to places to eat out. The ratings list has 142 shop premises, 17 pubs and 9 restaurants. Pulborough and Storrington have the most, and the smaller villages mostly have a church, a pub and a lot of hedge.
Air quality is good. Fine-particle pollution across the Horsham council area averaged about 6.5 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024, and that figure covers the whole district, not Pulborough alone.
The country houses and the history set the tone. Petworth House, Parham Park and Amberley Castle are all in the area, as are the remains of Bignor Roman Villa and the hillforts at Chanctonbury Ring and Cissbury Ring. Storrington sits at the foot of the Downs, and small places like Fittleworth, Bury and West Chiltington fill the gaps between. Iron Age barrows sit in the fields next to post-war estates, and nobody seems bothered by the mix.
Homes come with gardens. The area has about 421,000 square metres of private garden per 1,000 residents, which is a lot of lawn for each household to mow. Buyers used to a paved yard should budget weekends as well as money for the mower.
Counting business premises on the valuation list, the area has 803 rateable premises. Shops lead with 142, then 93 offices, and 25 premises are rated as holiday lets. These are premises on the list, not a count of businesses currently open, so an empty unit still counts.
Eating out is a safe bet on hygiene. Of the 166 food premises that have been rated, about 88% hold the top score of five, and only about 1% sit at the bottom end.
The designation maps show no area of outstanding natural beauty, no site of special scientific interest and no ancient woodland overlapping the area. That doesn't make the countryside any less real. It just means the fields around here are ordinary working farmland, not a protected landscape with a visitor centre.
The surroundings are one of the area's real strengths. There are fields, water and big old houses on every side, and nearly everyone lives within a short walk of green space.