Whyteleafe

Whyteleafe has three railway stations, a generous allowance for a village, on two parallel lines that agree about London and disagree about everything south of it, so the wrong platform turns a commute into a geography lesson. A few of its streets have slipped over the boundary into Croydon, a detail the listings tend to file under Surrey. The village is named after the pale underside of the whitebeam leaf, the side nobody looks at, and for a place most people only ever see from a train window, that is about right.