Despite genteel pretensions, the area retains much of it's South-East London pedigree and is quite rough (though affordable) in parts - particularly along the Greenwich High Road.

Greenwich is, I think, quite a nice place. Quite down to earth with affordable and characterful housing; a beautiful if touristy centre with decent pubs, fish and chips and so on. Greenwich is home to the magnificent maritime museum which is definitely worth a visit (make a day of it and take the ferry from central London). The recently revived 02 stadium is also close by. There are quite a few students in the area who are increasingly joined by workers from the Docklands.

Greenwich has decent transport links (mainly overland trains and the DLR). Given its proximity to the Docklands there is quite a lot of development going on in the area, the most notable of which has to be the remarkable Greenwich Millenium Village . - a massive complex of new housing built using the largest number buzzwords ('sustainable community', 'low-energy building techniques', etc.) in London. It is pedestrian only, has it's own primary school, GP clinic, shops and bars and aims to cut primary energy use by 80%. It is engineered so there's a reasonable probability you'll end up interacting with the neighbours. Since you can let the kids run around without worrying about them there's even the possibility they'll do something other than play nintendo all day.

The whole thing may be pie in the sky and it could well turn out that people don't actually want to talk to their neighbours. But at least more thought and imagination went into creating this than throwing up yet another soul-less shopping mall or utterly forgettable block of flats.

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