Lane End, Buckinghamshire

Lane End sounds like the place where the road gives up, which is unfair, because the M40 runs right past it and every garden in the village knows about it. It spent generations making chairs and still has the air of somewhere that built things for other people to sit on. An exiled King of Albania used to turn up at its village events during the war, and the resident ghost has been waiting on a wedding since 1766, so a new buyer from London is unlikely to cause much of a stir. You get the Chilterns out the back and the motorway in your ears, and the people who stay are the ones who stopped hearing the second one.