Thames Ditton

Thames Ditton has spent five hundred years staring across the river at Hampton Court Palace, and the house prices have picked up the palace's attitude without any of its square footage. It calls itself a village with the straight face of somewhere that has its own branch line to Waterloo and sits just far enough outside London to feel smug about it. The foundry behind the church once cast the four bronze horses on top of Wellington Arch. The heaviest thing produced here now is a letter objecting to next door's loft conversion.