Robertsbridge

Robertsbridge is a High Weald village with a mainline station, which makes it where people go when they want to leave London without London noticing. The monks who founded it were packed off in 1538, and the fourteenth-century houses on the High Street have been outlasting everyone else's plans ever since. The village gave the world the earliest surviving keyboard music and now makes cricket bats, which is a fair summary of the English idea of progress. The bypass arrived in 1989 to take the lorries away, and the residents have treated every change since as another lorry.