Kidlington

Kidlington spent decades insisting it was the biggest village in England, threw out the first attempt to call it a town, then became one anyway this year without the streets noticing the difference. It is where Oxfordshire keeps the things a city needs but would rather not look at: the police headquarters, the fire service headquarters, an immigration detention centre, and an airport that renamed itself after London. There is also an elephant on a roundabout, put there in memory of a zoo that closed before the war. Buyers come here for Oxford without paying to sleep in it, which is an honest pitch and more than the airport managed.