Waltham Cross

Waltham Cross is named after a monument to a dead queen whose coffin was carried through in 1290 on its way to somewhere grander, and the town has been on the way to somewhere grander ever since. It was nearly folded into Greater London in the 1960s, and it kept the London buses, the M25 along its southern edge and most of the capital's traffic, but not the postcode. The swans over the High Street are a replica and the printworks by the motorway churns out The Sun. Google then chose it for a data centre, which is how the wider world sees the place: handy for London, easy to reach and a good spot to leave things.