Barking, London

Barking ran the biggest fishing fleet in England until the Thames got too filthy to keep the cod alive, and now the only fish left are on the pub signs and a steel sculpture on a roundabout. Its town square won a European prize, and a whole new town is going up on the old power station land to the south, which is a lot of ambition for a place most Londoners know only as the end of the Hammersmith and City line. The people buying the new flats by the river have heard every joke about the name. They stopped laughing once they priced the same flat further west.