Highbridge, Somerset

Highbridge is a town that spent a hundred years being the place you went through on your way to somewhere better, and it has never quite forgiven the traffic for eventually finding a motorway. It shares a town council with Burnham-on-Sea, which locals have been trying to divorce since before the referendum failed, and the sign vandalism suggests the feeling has not softened. The wharf silted up, the cattle market moved to Bridgwater, the railway works took four hundred jobs with it, and the last bank shut its door in 2014 without anybody managing to stop it. What is left is a working town on the Levels that does not perform for anyone, which is either the whole appeal or the entire problem, depending on how much you need a place to flatter you.