Sutton

Sutton has spent a century being promised the Tube and keeps getting handed a consultation instead. The Northern Line was meant to end here in the 1920s, ran out of money at Morden, and the tram that was supposed to make up for it was put on hold in 2020. So the town consoled itself with shopping. It has a High Street nearly a mile long and the oldest bicycle shop in the world, an apt anchor for a place still waiting on a train. Plenty of residents still write Surrey on the envelope, and that tells you exactly how they feel about the London bit.