Ryde

Ryde is a Victorian seaside resort that woke up one morning as a commuter town for people who never quite leave the island. The pier is the fourth longest in the country, which is the sort of fact a place mentions when the shortest route to anywhere involves a boat. Behind the Regency terraces and the sands that go out for half a mile at low tide sits a great deal of post-war housing that nobody puts on a postcard, and the town gets on with it because the alternative is pretending otherwise. It has the arcades, the ferries and the bones of somewhere grand, and it wears all three like a good coat that hasn't been dry cleaned since the seventies.