Hemel Hempstead

Hemel Hempstead is a Tudor market town with a post-war new town built round it like scaffolding nobody ever took down. The Old Town kept the Norman church and the pretty high street; everyone else got a shopping parade each and a double roundabout so baffling that locals named it after a children's television programme. The railway station is a mile from the centre because a well-connected surgeon wanted the steam trains kept off his estate, and commuters have been walking off his snobbery ever since. It also has the biggest indoor ski slope in the country, which is a very Hertfordshire way of dealing with not having a mountain.