Honiton

Honiton is seventeen miles of Devon between you and anywhere, laid out along one long Georgian high street that exists because the place burned down twice and had to start again with better taste. The town made its name on lace so fine that Queen Victoria wore it to get married, and now the same street sells reclaimed pine and second-hand paperbacks to people slowing down on their way to the coast. The bypass arrived in 1966 to fix the traffic, which locals will tell you at length it did not. That is the deal here: a town that was somewhere important on the road to somewhere else, and has made a decent, unhurried peace with being the bit in between.