Bow, London

Bow is named after a bridge a queen ordered in 1110 because she had fallen in the river, and the locals then spent the next seven hundred years in court arguing over who should pay to mend it. Nobody has formally agreed where Bow starts or stops since it stopped being run as its own parish nearly a century ago, which suits estate agents fine, because a flat anywhere between Victoria Park and the Bow Flyover can claim the name. The famous Bow Bells that make you a Cockney ring in the City, miles to the west, so the one thing everybody knows about the place belongs to somebody else. What Bow keeps for itself is the A11 roaring through the middle, a canal on the doorstep and a long memory for a bill it never wanted to pay.