Westbury, Wiltshire

Westbury sits under Salisbury Plain with a giant white horse carved into the hillside above it, which is the sort of statement piece a town makes when it needs one. It was a cloth town, then an iron town, then a cement town, and each of those industries left in turn, which is less a decline than a habit. What survives is a railway junction where half the West Country's trains cross paths without most of the passengers ever getting off, a market place that stopped holding markets in the nineteenth century and kept the name anyway, and a town that has been quietly getting on with things while Bath charges people twenty quid to look at Georgian stone. Nobody moves to Westbury for the story. They move for the mortgage, and then find they rather like it.