Bramley, Hampshire

Bramley has a shop, a bakery, a pub and its own estate agency, which is one more estate agent than a village this size needs and tells you exactly who it expects through the door. Trains ran straight through for decades before a Duke of Wellington pulled rank and made them stop, so the station is the one thing here that arrived by complaining to the right person. The Army runs manoeuvres at the camp down the road, which makes the soldiers the only noisy neighbours nobody gets to object to at planning. Lise Meitner, who helped work out how to split the atom, lies in the churchyard, and nobody has yet found a better advert for somewhere quiet.