Charlton, London

Charlton is the bit between Greenwich and Woolwich that most people only see from the Woolwich Road on their way to a retail park, and the village up the hill prefers it that way. Up there you get a Jacobean mansion built for a prince who died before he could move in, a seventeenth-century coaching inn and an actual ironmonger: everything you need to pretend you still live in Kent. Defoe wanted the old Horn Fair suppressed as a rabble no civilised nation should put up with. The fair is long gone, though on match days at The Valley the tradition has clearly found somewhere new to go.