Chard, Somerset

Chard has been quietly getting on with things since roughly the moment powered flight was invented here and everyone decided to make the aeroplanes twenty miles up the road in Yeovil instead. That is the town in one line: it does the clever bit, then watches somebody else take it to market. The best-known thing to come out of it in the last fifty years is a vacuum cleaner with a face, which sells by the million and is still made in the town, and honestly there are worse legacies than a small smiling machine that gets on with the job without complaining. Come for the price of a three-bed, stay because leaving would require effort.