The area around Stevenage is greener than anyone who has only seen it from a car would guess. A park or green space is a couple of minutes' walk from the average front door. Water is not much further. Over a hundred pubs keep the evenings going. Most homes have a garden as well, which is more than a lot of commuter towns can promise.
The average home in Stevenage is about 130 metres from the nearest public green space, with about 28 green spaces within a kilometre. A medieval moated site in woodland and the Six Hills Roman barrows are both inside the town. A town planned from scratch got its parks drawn in before anyone could object to them, and the result is that green space is part of nearly every route home.
Water is about 440 metres away on average, with about 16 ponds, lakes or watercourses within a kilometre. Walkern, which this page also covers, is in the valley of the River Beane, the nearest thing the area has to a riverside village.
The National Cycle Network is about 1.3 kilometres from the average home, and about 26% of homes are close to it. That network links into the town's own cycleways, which run separately from the roads, so a long ride out of Stevenage can start without much time in traffic.
The rated-premises data counts 883 shops, 101 pubs and 64 restaurants across Stevenage. Some of the Old Town High Street pubs began as coaching inns on the Great North Road, and they have outlasted the stagecoaches, the arrival of the railway and the arrival of the New Town. The rest of the town does its drinking in the neighbourhood pubs the planners put on each estate.
Stevenage Borough Council's area recorded fine-particle pollution of about 7.2 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024.
The character changes quickly at the edges. Inside the town are the post-war neighbourhoods, Shephall, Bedwell, Chells, Pin Green, Broadwater and Symonds Green, each built around its own shops. Beyond them are villages such as Walkern, Ardeley, Graveley and Aston, and the parkland at Knebworth is a short drive south. Great Ashby, on the north-eastern edge, is the newest piece of the town and marks where it stopped growing, at least for now. From most parts of Stevenage, open fields are closer than the town's reputation suggests.
Private outdoor space adds up to about 63,000 square metres of garden for every 1,000 residents, measured across all 59 neighbourhoods in Stevenage. That reflects a housing stock built mostly as terraces and semis with gardens front and back, and why the flats are the minority here.
On the business rates list, Stevenage has 2,019 rateable premises. Offices are the biggest category at 517, ahead of 453 standard shop units and 206 warehouses. These are premises on the valuation list, some of them empty at any given time, and the office count shows how much of the town's daytime is spent at a desk.
Of the 412 food businesses rated for hygiene, about 85% hold the top score and about 2% are at the bottom end. A curry or a carvery here is very unlikely to come with a hygiene problem.
No protected landscape overlaps Stevenage itself. There is no area of outstanding natural beauty, no site of special scientific interest and no ancient woodland on the records. The countryside around here is ordinary working Hertfordshire farmland and woods, which makes it easy to reach and leaves nobody worrying about its status.
What surrounds Stevenage is one of the best things about living there. Green space is close to almost every home, the villages are a short drive away, and gardens are standard, which is a lot of greenery for a town people mostly know as a station and a few roundabouts.