Welwyn

Welwyn has been bypassed for a century and has made something of a career of it. The railway went round because the local landowners objected, Britain's first bypass went round in 1927, and then the motorway went round the bypass, so the old coaching inns now serve a village that hears the evening jams from a field away. The much newer and bigger town a mile south borrowed the name outright, and its residents now call the original "Old Welwyn", as if the village were the one that needed telling apart. It tried rebranding as Welwyn Minster in 1990, and the new name stopped there about as reliably as the trains.