Sunbury-on-Thames

Sunbury was meant to become London in 1965, got handed to Surrey instead, and the Royal Mail still writes Middlesex on the envelope, which is roughly how much anyone here was consulted. The town comes in two halves: Georgian riverside in Lower Sunbury, where a gang of music-hall stars met at the Magpie and founded the Grand Order of Water Rats, and a post-war spread up at Sunbury Cross that most of the south-east knows only as the junction where the M3 traffic stops. Buyers who wanted Hampton's river without Hampton's prices call it a compromise for about a year. After that they start defending it at dinner parties.