Haslemere

Haslemere is as far as money can get from London and still say it lives in Surrey. The town is wedged so deep into the corner that Hampshire and West Sussex both start at the end of Shottermill, and the roads, which began life as medieval tracks, still drive like it. George Eliot wrote much of Middlemarch here, a novel about clever people slowly going quiet in a provincial town, which reads as either a warning or a mission statement depending on how long you've lived here.