East Cowes

East Cowes is what happens when a working shipyard and a royal summer palace end up sharing a postcode and neither one blinks. Queen Victoria died in a house at the end of the road, John Nash is buried in the church he designed, and the town's proudest piece of public art is a Union Jack painted on a hangar door big enough to be seen from space. The chain ferry to the posher half of the same conurbation still runs on a chain, which tells you roughly everything about the pace of change here. It is a town with a palace attached and absolutely no interest in mentioning it.