Looe

Looe is two towns that hate each other separated by a river, joined by a bridge, and the tourists never notice. It was sacked by Barbary pirates in 1625 who carted eighty men off to North Africa in chains, which remains the second most disruptive thing to happen to the harbour after the arrival of the day-trippers. The fishermen built their houses with the living quarters upstairs and the storage below, because the water comes in and always has, and four hundred years later the cottages still do it, which tells you everything about whether the sea has been talked round. It is genuinely beautiful, relentlessly steep, and full of people who came for a fortnight in 1998 and simply never left.