Ewell

Ewell is the bit of Surrey that kept a London phone number and has never quite explained why. Henry VIII built his grandest palace here and the town managed to lose it, so the boldest building left is a 1960s library shaped like a flying saucer, parked in a park beside a duck pond. The banks have all gone, but the telephone exchange next to The Spring pub was built to survive a nuclear war, which tells you what got priority. People choose it over Epsom for the calm and the 020 code, and only one of those reasons gets said out loud.