Around Wallingford it is river, fields and footpaths, and they come right up to most people's doors. The nearest green space is a couple of minutes' walk. The Thames is only a little further. A national cycle route passes close to most homes. Nobody has formally protected any of it, and nobody has spoiled it either.
The typical home in Wallingford is about 150 metres from the nearest public green space, with about 24 green spaces within a kilometre. The Bull Croft recreation ground off the High Street was once the site of Wallingford Priory, which produced a mathematician and a chronicler. These days it mostly produces dog walkers.
Water is almost as close. The nearest river, stream or pond is typically about 215 metres away, with about 47 within a kilometre. Most of that is the Thames and the streams that run into it. At Chalmore, upstream of the town, the lock was taken out in 1883 and left a long clear stretch of river, and the rowers moved in. Oxford University Boat Club built a boathouse there in 2006. Few stretches of river have been improved so much by someone deciding to stop maintaining them.
The National Cycle Network is typically about 390 metres from the front door, and about 68% of postcodes count as close to it. That gives most cyclists an off-road start without loading the bike on the car. There is no ancient woodland inside the town's boundary.
The OX10 postcode district, which takes in Wallingford and the villages around it, has 139 shops, 24 pubs and 12 restaurants on the rating list. The high street is built for shopping and a drink more than for evenings out.
Fine-particle air pollution across South Oxfordshire averaged about 7 micrograms per cubic metre in 2024. That is the district-wide reading, which spreads the town's traffic across a lot of open fields.
The countryside close by has more to see than the town's map suggests. Sinodun Hill camp and Brightwell Barrow are scheduled monuments just to the north-west. Little Wittenham, North Stoke and Brightwell-cum-Sotwell each have their own conservation area. Shillingford Bridge and Wallingford Bridge are both listed and cross the Thames either side of the town. Crowmarsh Gifford is on the far bank, with Mongewell and Newnham Murren beyond it. In the town itself, Champions hardware store has been open since 1869, which makes it one of the more permanent things in the area. The castle is older, but successive kings took most of it away for building stone.
People here have a fair amount of their own outside space as well. Across the town there are about 146,000 square metres of private garden for every 1,000 residents. Wallingford is a town of houses with gardens, and the post-war semis have the sort of back gardens that once housed vegetable patches and now house trampolines.
The non-domestic rating list for the area holds 394 premises. The largest groups are 100 shop premises, 81 offices and 59 warehouses. These are buildings on the valuation list, which is not the same as businesses trading today. The office count is the surprise. The Hithercroft Trading Estate and the research organisations on the edge of town employ more people than the high street does.
Of the 76 food premises rated for hygiene, about 76% have the top score and none are rated at the bottom of the scale. Takeaways don't come much more reassuring than that.
No area of outstanding natural beauty, site of special scientific interest or ancient woodland overlaps the town. This is ordinary Thames valley farmland that has managed to look like a protected landscape without the paperwork.
The countryside is the best thing about living in Wallingford. The river, the fields and the cycle routes all start a few minutes from home, and none of them needs a drive to get to.