Beaconsfield

Beaconsfield is where Enid Blyton spent most of her life, and the town still reads like one of her books: big houses, grammar-school ambitions and lashings of gravel drive behind hedges you could lose a Labrador in. The Old Town keeps the coaching pubs and the old frontages, the New Town keeps the commute, and the M40 runs past both of them. The hardest address in town to get into is Bekonscot, the model village, where the trains run on time, the houses are affordable and nobody has to sit the eleven-plus.