Littlehampton

Littlehampton spent the 1920s selling itself as 'The Children's Paradise' and has been quietly living down the promise ever since. It sits between Arundel's Duke-of-Norfolk poshness and Bognor's 'bugger Bognor' energy, doing neither, and settling instead for being the town people pick when Brighton has gone London-priced and Worthing feels like defeat. The Body Shop put its world headquarters here in the eighties, which tells you the exact strain of earnest middle-class hopefulness the place has been running on ever since. Even the name was a hedge: too small to be Southampton, too proud to say so.