Pirbright

Pirbright is two villages sharing a railway line and not much else: a cricket-green postcard on one side, and on the other an Army training centre turning teenagers into soldiers while the postcard politely pretends not to hear the shouting. The heath all round belongs to the Ministry of Defence, which has done more to stop Surrey filling up with executive cul-de-sacs than any planning committee ever managed, because nobody sells a four-bed with views of a firing range. Henry Morton Stanley is buried in the churchyard under a granite boulder, and a stretch of the local brook now answers to the Congo Stream. Nothing that happens in the village gets played down.