Cranleigh

Cranleigh grew to the size of a town and kept calling itself a village, the way someone with three cars on the drive still calls the house a cottage. It lost its railway to Beeching in 1965 and put a Sainsbury's where the station stood, which tells you how the place prefers to arrive: by car, with bags for life. The old platform edge is still visible behind the shops, a small memorial to a commute that now starts on a gravel drive. The maples on the High Street are widely credited to Canadian soldiers, and they had nothing to do with it, which is Cranleigh all over: a lovely story, told with confidence and slightly wrong.