Andover, Hampshire

Andover was built to be somewhere else's overspill, which is a hell of a founding purpose for a town that had already survived two fires, the plague three separate times, and a workhouse scandal grim enough to change national law. What it got in return was a bypass, an industrial estate, a shopping centre named after a chantry that isn't there, and a steady expansion into estates with names that sound like housing developments pretending to be Iron Age settlements. The result is a town that works, in the way a well-organised depot works, sitting between Salisbury Plain and the A303 with the quiet confidence of a place nobody has ever driven to on purpose. Stay a while and it grows on you, mostly because the alternative is Basingstoke.