There’s still romance here, but the seat of monarchs has given way to humble, suburban dreams

On the surface, it’s your average London sprawl of 1930s semis, but it hides its treasures

Reiki this, hot stone that: these two towns are a haven of well-heeled spirituality

The city is cool, with a vast music and design scene, and an under-the-radar swagger

The keeping of one and brewing of the other have long gone hand in hand in this beautiful market town

Hopefully the investment, headlines and hullaballoo will help it to shout its many histories from its beautiful rooftops

Ignore its more suburban edges and concentrate on the oaks, ickle ponies, witches and ye olde Norman lore

It’s like a miniature Harrogate, with smartly painted Victorian townhouses, Bettys and a beautiful lido

Pretty, alluring and a tad quieter than the southern shores, this is an illustrious stretch of coastline

Many will run for the hills, but others find its squelchy fields, sluice gates and forlorn villages impossibly romantic

A convivial and unpretentious ‘book town’, though it may be too lonely for some

There is something irresistibly timeless about the place, in our age of freneticness

It has entered the 21st century – but only just

Property developers are trying to reimagine the town as some kind of Middlesex Manhattan – but they don’t have it all their own way

Everything feels different, as though the light this far north comes from a different sun

It might be under the radar but it’s packed with magical old villages and market towns

A strong and independent spot, not much given to pretension

The waves, I should add, do not need encouragement. The soft marshy sludge and crumbly fudge of the land is disappearing

Its beautiful architecture is mostly down to a spot of relatively benign dictatorship

It’s full of pinnacles, crow-stepped gables and baronial turrets as if Disney’s imagineers had sketched it themselves