Epsom

Epsom made its name on a spring whose water sent seventeenth-century London galloping for the privy, then lost the trade the moment somebody worked out how to make the salts in a factory. Charles II met Nell Gwyn here, and the High Street has spent the centuries since trying to follow that act with a clock tower. These days the horses get the Downs, the commuters get the trains to Waterloo and Victoria, and anyone who brings up what the famous salts were for gets a look.