Yarmouth

Yarmouth is what happens when a town gets famous for the boat that takes you away from it. Henry the Eighth built a castle here to fend off the French, and the locals have been quietly fending off everyone else ever since, mostly by being old enough to remember when the trains ran and stubborn enough not to mind that they don't. It is a Norman street grid with a Tudor gun platform, the longest timber pier in England, and a ferry queue that constitutes the social calendar. Whitstable it isn't, and thank God for that.