Newent

Newent is in the Forest of Dean district but outside the Royal Forest of Dean, a technicality a town this old clearly enjoys keeping. It swapped its canal for a railway and then lost the railway too, so the cars now do the job the trains gave up on, all of them filing past a half-timbered Market House perched on stilts like it is still waiting for a better offer. The replica Victorian street built as a museum was eventually taken over by actual shopkeepers, and that is as close as Newent gets to pretending. Joe Meek grew up here and went to London to record the future, and Newent has been perfectly content in the past without him.