On the east riverside is the WWT London Wetland Centre adjoining Barn Elms playing fields.

The trail is marked by silver discs set in the ground and with QR-coded information on distinctive oar signs.

The Thames Path National Trail provides a public promenade along the entire bend of the river which is on the Championship Course in rowing.

Many of the roads in Barnes are residential, but several arterial routes pass through the district, carrying traffic across London and South East England.

A kerbsite site along Castelnau (a main road whose traffic level has greatly reduced due to the bridge closure) recorded an annual mean concentration of NO2 at 31 μg.m−3 (micrograms per cubic metre) in 2017.

The Wetlands monitoring site recorded far lower (i.e. cleaner) results than Castelnau did in 2017, with an annual mean NO2 concentration at 21 μg.m−3, and a mean reading of 15 μg.m−3 for PM10.

Transport for London (TfL), in conjunction with Thames Clippers (branded as Uber Boat), run riverboat services from nearby Putney Pier to Blackfriars, weekday morning and evenings only.

It was held by the Canons of St Paul of London when its assets were: eight hides, paying tax with Mortlake; six ploughlands, 20 acres (81,000 m2) of meadow.

The original Norman chapel of St Mary's, Barnes' village church, was built at some point between 1100 and 1150,[12] and was subsequently extended in the early 13th century.

In 1215, immediately after confirming the sealing of Magna Carta, Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, stopped on the river at Barnes to dedicate St Mary's church.

[14] Some of the oldest riverside housing in London is to be found on The Terrace, a road lined with Georgian mansions which runs along the west bend of the river.

[18][19]: 59 The Grade II listed Barnes Railway Bridge, originally constructed in 1849 by Joseph Locke, dominates the view of the river from the Terrace.

[21] Its 120 acres (0.49 km2) dominate the south of Barnes, providing a rural setting to the village and a wealth of habitats including acid grassland, scrub, woodland and wetland.

The majority of the WWT London Wetland Centre comprises areas of standing open water, grazing marsh and reed bed.

The Barnes Trail, a 2.3-mile circular walk funded by the Mayor of London and Richmond upon Thames Council, was opened in June 2013.

[23] It gained in 2014 a further QR code-marked extension, along its riverside, which equates to the Thames Path National Trail; part of this is wide, pavemented embankments with Victorian townhouses and the rest is tree-lined green space.

The memorial receives frequent visits from his fans, and in 1997 a bronze bust of Bolan was installed to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death.

Originally a local cinema and for many years a leading recording studio, down the decades Olympic played host to some of the greatest stars in the history of popular music.

[26][27] The Rolling Stones later went on to become such frequent visitors that Mick Jagger gradually designed part of the studio's features himself,[28] while Jimi Hendrix also spent a significant proportion of his entire recording career in the quiet surroundings of Barnes, recording tracks for all three of his studio albums there.

[30] The building was previously the postal sorting office, but was redeveloped into a mixture of residential and commercial space with the first residents moving there in 1999.

First, a former High Master of St Paul's School, Richard Mulcaster, is credited with taking mob football and turning it into an organised, refereed team sport that was considered beneficial for schoolboys.

In 1863, he wrote to the weekly sporting newspaper Bell's Life proposing a governing body for football, and this led to the first meeting at the Freemasons' Tavern where the FA was created.

A statue of Steve Fairbairn, who revolutionised technique and equipment in the sport, is by the river close to the London Wetlands Centre in the district.

To achieve this, approximately half of one of the two wards covering modern Barnes also falls within the boundaries of neighbouring Mortlake.