Dagenham

Dagenham built Britain's family cars until Ford stopped assembling them here and kept making the engines, like a bakery that drops the bread and keeps the ovens running. The Becontree estate went up around the old village in the 1920s, and its terraces have now outlasted the car line, the council that built them and everyone who called them a stopgap. The entire Cabinet once trekked out every spring for a whitebait feast, until it decided Greenwich was easier to get to. Westminster has found Dagenham a bit far ever since.