Hampton, London

Hampton is the place Hampton Court Palace is named after, and it has spent five centuries watching coachloads of tourists walk straight past it to get there. Henry VIII walled off the best of the land for his hunting, so the locals now have a royal deer park at the end of the road and the faint sense of living in somebody else's garden. The riverside waterworks has kept London's kettles filled for generations, and the suburb behaves the same way. It is useful and well kept, and a bit put out that nobody in Kensington could find it on a map.