Banbury

Banbury is the town most of England knows from a nursery rhyme and a motorway sign, and a fair few of its residents use it the same way, as somewhere to sleep between the M40 and work. Motor racing teams have built cars here for decades, which is a cruel joke to play on anyone stuck on Hennef Way at half five. Someone in the nineteenth century decided the town deserved its own county, called it Banburyshire, and nobody has had the heart to take it away. Oxford got the spires; Banbury got junction 11, and the people moving here are usually honest enough to admit which one they came for.