Farnborough, Hampshire

Farnborough is where Britain learned to fly, and it has spent the century since watching other people's aeroplanes take off. The airport handles private jets and nothing you could book with a loyalty card, so for most residents the aviation heritage comes down to one week every other summer when the sky gets loud. The rest of the time it is a tidy post-war commuter town with a French empress buried in the abbey crypt, and she is the only resident who never complains about the trains to Waterloo.