The countryside around Stow-on-the-Wold is the best thing about living there. Public green space is a two-minute walk from most front doors. A national cycle route runs past almost every postcode. All of it lies inside protected Cotswold landscape. The town is the busy part, and the hills around it are what make the busy part worth it.
The average home in Stow is about 170 metres from public green space, and there are around eight green spaces within a kilometre. Nobody in Stow has to get in the car to walk the dog, and with the ring of villages around the town, most have a choice of direction.
Water is the one thing Stow is short of. The average home is about 1.3 kilometres from the nearest river, lake or pond, and there is on average about 0.1 within a kilometre, so most homes have none that close. The River Dikler is down in the valley at Lower Swell, below the town.
The National Cycle Network is about 270 metres from the average home, and about 95% of postcodes are close to it. There is no ancient woodland in the area. The landscape is open fields and stone walls, with very little forest.
Across the wider postcode district, the rating list counts 261 shops, 38 pubs and nine restaurants. That is a district of shopkeepers and drinkers with only a few places to eat a sit-down meal.
Cotswold District recorded fine-particle pollution of about 6 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024, a figure for the whole council area. The air on the hilltop has very little industry to share it with.
All of the area lies inside the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and none of it overlaps a site of special scientific interest. The protection here is about the look of the landscape, not rare wildlife.
The surroundings are a ring of small stone villages with their own conservation areas: Lower Swell and Upper Swell, Broadwell, Donnington, Evenlode, Icomb and Lower Slaughter. Maugersbury and Condicote are close by too, and the gardens at Abbotswood are on the edge of town. Under the fields there is a long history. Long barrows at Lower Swell and Ganborough, the prehistoric enclosure known as Stow Camp, the hillfort at Icomb and a Roman villa at Broadwell are all scheduled monuments. People have been choosing these hills, and staying in them permanently, since well before anyone was selling the view.
Private outdoor space is generous. The area has about 178,000 square metres of private garden for every 1,000 residents. Measured as a share of the land, gardens look small, but only because the land includes the surrounding farmland, and that comparison would understate how much garden people here actually have.
The council's valuation list has 284 rateable premises in the area, including 127 shops, 89 self-catering holiday units and 26 offices. These are premises on a tax list, which is not the same as businesses currently trading, but the mix is clear enough. For every three shops in Stow there are roughly two holiday lets, which tells you who much of the town is set up to serve.
Of the 49 food premises with a hygiene rating, about 88% hold the top score of five and none are rated poorly. For a town that feeds a lot of visitors, the kitchens are well run.
The countryside is one of Stow's real strengths. It has green space and footpaths on every side, and the landscape around it is protected, with water the one thing missing.