Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes was designed by people who decided in the 1960s that nobody would ever need to walk anywhere, and it has spent the decades since proving them right with grid roads and a roundabout for every mood. It was placed with great care between London, Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge, so residents are a short drive from every place their friends assume they'd rather live. It asked to be a city, got turned down, asked again and again, and was finally waved through on a royal jubilee, with the patience of a place that has never once been stuck in traffic. The people who sneer at it tend to be doing so from a single-lane Georgian high street, behind a bin lorry.