Tiverton, Devon

Tiverton is a town that made its money from wool, lost it, made it again from lace, lost that too, and has spent the years since being sensibly relieved that the motorway junction is only six miles away. It burned down in 1596, burned down again in 1612 because two dogs started fighting and nobody was watching the furnace, and burned down a third time in 1731, after which somebody had the idea of making the streets wider. The town's own railway station shut sixty years ago and the replacement got built next to the M5 and named after Tiverton anyway, which tells you exactly how much of the place now points east towards Exeter and Taunton at ten past seven every morning. Handsome church, decent river, four fords' worth of history, and a population that would quite like the traffic to stop pretending it's a bypass.