The area around Tring is hills, reservoirs and footpaths, with a market town in the middle. The average home has about twenty green spaces within a kilometre. Water is a few minutes' walk away. The Chiltern Hills almost surround the town. The town itself is fairly ordinary, and most of its appeal is in what lies around it.
The average Tring home is about 140 metres from the nearest public green space and has about 20 within a kilometre. Tring Park, the Rothschilds' old estate, is a registered historic park, and the town has kept it as open land. Most people have a park within a short walk of the front door.
The nearest water is about 410 metres away on average, and about 20 bodies of water lie within a kilometre of the typical home. Much of that is the Grand Union Canal and the four Tring Reservoirs at Wilstone, Tringford, Startops End and Marsworth, which were built to feed the canal and have been a national nature reserve since 1955. Tring is a long way inland, and yet water is close to most homes.
The National Cycle Network is about 9 kilometres away on average, and no postcode in the area is close to it. The Ridgeway runs past Iron Age barrows on the edge of town, so the hills around Tring are mostly walked.
The rated-premises list counts 79 shops, 17 pubs and 11 restaurants in Tring. Tring Brewery has been brewing in the town since 1992, and 17 pubs give it plenty of places to sell the beer.
Dacorum's fine-particle level was about 7 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024, a figure for the whole borough.
About 3% of the area falls within the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which almost surrounds the town and takes in the National Trust's Ashridge Estate near Aldbury. No site of special scientific interest and no ancient woodland fall inside Tring's own boundary, which runs close around the built-up town. The reservoirs, a site of special scientific interest since 1987, lie just to the north.
The town has the Natural History Museum at Tring, where Walter Rothschild's private zoological museum once held what may have been the world's largest collection of taxidermy. The old livestock market hosts a Friday market and a fortnightly farmers' market, and the Tring Book Festival runs for two weeks in November. Beyond the town are hamlets such as Hastoe, Little Tring, New Mill and Bulbourne, and villages such as Wigginton, Puttenham and Long Marston. Few towns this size have this much to see and do within walking distance.
Private gardens add plenty more. Tring has about 122,000 square metres of garden for every 1,000 residents, so most houses come with a decent garden of their own as well as the countryside beyond it.
The Valuation Office lists 442 rateable premises in Tring. Offices are the largest group at 153, followed by shops at 73. Those are premises on the rating list, and some may be empty or used for something else. Huel, the food company, has its headquarters here.
Of the 74 food businesses rated for hygiene in Tring, about 72% have the top score and about 1% are rated poorly. For a town with 17 pubs, the kitchens are in good shape.
Tring's setting is the best thing about it, with hills, water and parkland within a short walk of almost every front door.