Swanage

Swanage is what happens when a Victorian builder gets rich in London and ships the leftovers home: a clock tower nobody wanted on London Bridge, a stone globe the size of a shed, and a town that has been quietly wearing another city's cast-offs ever since. It works, mostly, because the setting is so absurdly good that the town could get away with a lot more than a borrowed façade and a steam railway run by volunteers. The catch is the season. For a few months it belongs to people in wetsuits and queues for ice cream, and for the rest of it the wind comes off the bay and the seafront looks like a stage set after the cast has gone home.