Herne Bay

Herne Bay has a pier with no middle: a storm took the bit connecting the town to the fun in 1978, and nobody has paid to put it back. London investors once tried to rename the place St Augustine's, the residents said no, and that stubbornness has been the house style ever since. Whitstable, up the road, got the attention; Herne Bay got the quiet, the cheaper seafront and the world's first purpose-built clock tower, which tells you the town has been keeping an eye on the time while not much happens. Plenty of buyers arrive here because they were priced out of the next town along, and they'll tell anyone who asks that they preferred it all along.