Plymouth

Plymouth is a city that was flattened by the Luftwaffe and then finished off by a town planner with a ruler and a vision, and it has spent eighty years being sniffed at by people who have never stood on the Hoe at dusk. The water is the best thing any English city has, the naval history is the real thing rather than a heritage trail with a gift shop, and the streets between them were designed to be driven through rather than lingered in. It is a place that gave the world Drake, the Pilgrims and a gin that outlasted the Empire, and it still gets described by outsiders as somewhere you pass through on the way to Cornwall. Anyone who moves here and expects to be flattered has come to the wrong end of Devon.