Places to explore near Watford

London to Birmingham by water — the trunk route of the canal age, with arms reaching Leicester, Aylesbury, Northampton and Paddington.

2.6 km W · spans 9 counties

Hertfordshire's grand circuit from the Royce Stone at Royston — chalk streams, commons and country houses for nearly 200 miles.

3.2 km NE · Hertfordshire

The Making of Harry Potter at Leavesden, a walk through the original film sets, props and Diagon Alley near Watford.

4.3 km NW

Beech woods and chalk downland within easy reach of London, laced with old ridge paths and grazing red kites

6.4 km W

Rescued historic buildings re-erected across parkland near Chalfont St Giles, from an Iron Age house to Victorian farm and chapel.

10.7 km W

Long Norman abbey church over Roman Verulamium.

10.9 km N

Historic city grown from the Roman town of Verulamium, its cathedral and medieval streets rising above the Ver and Verulamium Park.

11.6 km N · Hertfordshire

Chilterns village round a green and pond, keeping Milton's Cottage where Paradise Lost was finished and neighbouring the Chiltern Open Air Museum.

12.8 km W · Buckinghamshire

Old market town in the Misbourne valley with a broad high street of coaching inns, timbered houses and a 17th-century market hall below hilltop new Amersham.

14.9 km W · Buckinghamshire

Jacobean palace of the Cecils and Elizabeth I.

17.2 km NE

Common-side dining pub on the edge of Harpenden.

17.5 km N

An Edwardian pergola of stone columns and wisteria built for soap magnate Lord Leverhulme.

17.5 km SE

The oldest model village in the world, a 1920s miniature landscape of towns and railways in the gardens at Beaconsfield.

18.2 km W

Deep wooded Iron Age earthwork on the edge of Wheathampstead, thought to be part of a stronghold of the Catuvellauni tribe.

18.2 km NE

A Robert Adam mansion and its lakes, hemmed in by the west London suburbs but still a proper green escape

18.7 km S

A long-held family pub in a Chilterns village, The Good Pub Guide's Country Pub of the Year 2019.

18.9 km W

Quiet Misbourne village of old cottages and a manor, its flint church keeping medieval wall paintings, spared the through-traffic of its larger neighbour.

19.3 km W · Buckinghamshire

Vast oak-framed barn of the 1420s built for Winchester College near Heathrow, which John Betjeman called the Cathedral of Middlesex.

19.5 km S

A Victorian burial ground of 1839 where Karl Marx and George Eliot lie.

19.6 km SE

The river from its Cotswold trickle to the Thames Barrier — the gentlest long walk in Britain.

19.9 km S · spans 7 counties

World Heritage botanic garden of the Palm House and the Pagoda.

21.3 km S

Chiltern-edge village with a duck pond, old stocks and whipping post on the green, timbered cottages climbing towards Ashridge woods.

21.6 km NW · Hertfordshire

Beech woods and chalk downs on the Chilterns edge.

21.8 km NW

Secluded lane-end hamlet of George Bernard Shaw's home, a ruined old church and a Palladian eyecatcher church built as a folly.

21.9 km NE · Hertfordshire

Granite column of 1832 rising above the Ashridge beeches near Aldbury, climbable in summer for a thirty-mile view across the Chilterns.

22 km NW

Queen Caroline's 1720s pleasure garden, with J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan statue by the Long Water.

22.1 km SE

Museum in Great Missenden's high street built around Dahl's archive and writing hut, in the village where he lived and is buried.

22.4 km W

Misbourne-valley village where Roald Dahl lived and wrote, its high street of old shops and coaching inns feeding the museum, the Nags Head and the churchyard where he is buried.

22.6 km W · Buckinghamshire

London's great royal park of the Serpentine and Speakers' Corner.

22.8 km SE

High Chilterns village round a broad green with a cricket pitch and old church, often called one of England's most perfect villages.

22.8 km W · Buckinghamshire

The non-tidal Thames — 45 locks of managed river between Cricklade's meadows and the tideway at Teddington.

23.1 km SW · spans 7 counties

Italianate mansion above grand Thames-side gardens.

23.3 km SW

A 1720s Palladian villa built for a royal mistress, with Alexander Pope's input.

23.5 km S

Wellington's townhouse at Hyde Park Corner, nicknamed Number One London, filled with his paintings and Canova's colossal nude statue of Napoleon.

23.6 km SE

Two vast airship hangars built for the R101 that still dominate the flat land south-east of Bedford, among the largest structures in the country.

23.8 km N

A Humphry Repton landscape of lakes and meadows, home to an ancient Great Oak.

23.8 km NE

The Bishops of London's country home for over a thousand years, with a 1490s Tudor courtyard.

23.9 km SE

Thames town whose High Street of old shop fronts runs from Windsor Bridge to Henry VI's Eton College

24 km SW · Berkshire

Walter Rothschild's own zoological museum in Tring, its Victorian galleries crammed with mounted animals from around the world.

24 km NW

One of the Royal Parks, walled by Charles II in 1660 — just trees and grass.

24 km SE

A ten-acre garden planted between the wars in the outline of a cathedral, with grass avenues for nave and transepts and 'walls' of trees, a memorial to the fallen.

24.1 km NW

A vast recumbent lion cut into Dunstable Downs in the early 1930s to mark the zoo below — big enough to see from the air.

24.2 km NW

The monarch's London palace, its State Rooms open each summer.

24.2 km SE

Family wildlife park near Broxbourne with big cats and hundreds of exotic animals, voted a top county attraction.

24.2 km E

Largest occupied castle in the world.

24.3 km SW

A rare survival of a grand Stuart house, with formal 17th-century gardens right on the Thames at Richmond

24.4 km S

Thames-side village of Stanley Spencer, who painted its riverbank and church and is remembered in a gallery on the high street.

24.4 km SW · Berkshire

London's oldest royal park, enclosed by Henry VIII, with pelicans kept here since 1664.

24.5 km SE

Nelson's Column and the National Gallery at the heart of London.

24.5 km SE

Horace Walpole's self-styled little Gothic castle of 1749, which launched the Gothic Revival.

24.6 km S · London

The 'M25 for walkers' — an orbital path through outer London's woods, commons and river valleys from Erith to Purfleet.

3.1 km SW · spans 5 counties

A country park in Hertfordshire.

4.9 km E

A country park in Hertfordshire.

6 km SW

A country park in London.

6 km SE

Chess-valley village strung along one of the longest greens in the county, with old cottages and a flint church down by the river.

7.4 km W · Hertfordshire

The Chiltern Society's grand loop through four counties of beechwood and chalk, grown from a Millennium project into 177 miles.

7.8 km W · spans 5 counties

A country park in London.

8.5 km SW

London's inner orbital walk, stringing together 78 miles of parks, canals and viewpoints through the middle suburbs.

9.9 km S · London

Saxon-founded church over a thousand years old on the southern edge of St Albans, set in an acre of tree-filled churchyard.

10 km N