Cullompton

Cullompton is a town that got a motorway junction where its railway station used to be, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the last sixty years went. The high street is genuinely handsome, a long medieval spine with a fifteenth-century church tower visible from three fields away, and for decades the reward for living beside it was watching every lorry bound for the M5 grind past your front window. Five thousand houses are coming to the east and a relief road is meant to arrive first, which locals will believe when they are driving on it. In the meantime it is a proper Devon market town wearing a service-station postcode, and it has more character than anywhere that close to a Costa Express has any right to.