Bletchley

Bletchley had a railway junction, a brickworks and its own council long before Milton Keynes arrived and filed it under the south-west corner. The world knows the name because of the codebreakers, which is a lot of reputation to hang on a town that spent the post-war years building estates for Londoners whose streets had been bombed out. Visitors come for the Enigma story and go home by train, and Bletchley has had decades of practice at being famous for something that happened behind a fence. The cleverest thing ever done here was kept secret, and the town has been modest about everything since.