Gillingham, Dorset

Gillingham is the town that got the railway and never quite worked out what to do with it, which is how you end up with a Saxon cross shaft, a Domesday entry, and a retail park within the same square mile. Constable came here to paint the bridge and left, which is the arrangement most people arrive at eventually. It is genuinely handsome in the way the Blackmore Vale is handsome, wet fields and slow water and a church that has been rebuilt so many times it has stopped pretending to be old. If you want somewhere that will let you get on with things without asking you to have opinions about it, this is the one.