Bradley Stoke

Bradley Stoke went up in the eighties as one of the biggest private housing developments in Europe, and for a while the residents called it Sadly Broke, because the houses were worth less than the mortgages and there was nowhere nearby to spend money you didn't have. The place was planned around a Tesco and three motorways, which tells you what it was built to be near rather than what it was built to be. It has since acquired a secondary school, a leisure centre and something approaching a personality, roughly in that order. Nobody moves here for the romance, and nobody living here is pretending they did.