Byfleet

The Domesday Book valued Byfleet partly in eels, and the village has been priced by whatever happens next door ever since. For most of the last century that meant brand-new aircraft from Brooklands making their maiden flights straight over the village centre, which is how a place learns to shrug at a motorway. The M25 and the Wey Navigation now keep it apart from West Byfleet, a border both villages guard with suspicious enthusiasm for two places that share a name.