Salisbury

Salisbury is a cathedral city that has spent eight hundred years being magnificent at you. The spire is genuinely the tallest in the country and the locals will find a way to tell you within about four minutes, usually while apologising for mentioning it. It is a place of grammar schools, water meadows, and a Close full of Georgian houses whose owners have strong feelings about window frames, ringed by post-war estates that nobody puts on the postcards. Come for the medieval grandeur, stay because the traffic on the ring road means you cannot leave.