Wellington, Somerset

Wellington has spent two centuries being famous for a bloke who never lived here, commemorated by an obelisk that took thirty-seven years to finish because nobody could quite be bothered to fund the last bit. That tells you most of what you need to know about the pace. It is a working cloth town on the road to somewhere else, close enough to the motorway that people find it and far enough from Taunton that they can pretend they chose it, and it has been quietly making very good wool for very expensive suits since before the Duke got his title. The trains still go past the old station at speed. None of them stop, which residents have been writing letters about for roughly sixty years.