Grays, Essex

Grays runs a borough whose name, Thurrock, means the place where bilge water collects, and that is the kind of honesty most towns pay a branding agency to remove. It has a beach on the Thames, with a Victorian lightship slowly falling apart on the foreshore, and nobody has ever stood on either and thought of Cornwall. Most of Essex knows it as the turn-off before Lakeside. The people who live here know it's a straight train into London, and they're in no hurry to correct anyone.