Hampstead

Hampstead has been selling the idea of itself since 1700, when the local well trustees started advertising iron-flavoured spring water as medicine. The spa folded, but the brochure kept going. The product now is the Heath, the blue plaques and the faint hope that a novelist lives upstairs, and the usual purchase is a country-house price for a flat carved out of somebody else's Victorian villa. The bohemians are long gone, but you can still pay handsomely to live where they used to.