Sandy, Bedfordshire

Sandy has spent the best part of two thousand years as somewhere people pass on the way to somewhere else, first as a Roman staging post and now as the town the A1 hugs along its western edge like a bouncer keeping it out of the conversation. It called its main square Market Square decades before anyone let it hold a market, and built a Town Hall that never housed a council, which says a lot about how far the town's confidence runs ahead of its paperwork. When the planners revived the Oxford to Cambridge railway, they drew the new line round Sandy and put the station in Tempsford, having already turned the old line through town into a cycle path.