Nursling

Nursling spent the eighth century as a seat of learning, where the man who became Saint Boniface wrote the first Latin grammar in England and then decided Germany looked more promising and cleared off. The Danes flattened the monastery in 878 and nobody got round to rebuilding it, which tells you roughly how the place has felt about ambition ever since. These days it has been quietly swallowed by Southampton while insisting, with the firmness of a man denying he's been drinking, that it belongs to Test Valley. Its best-known modern landmark is a motorway service station.