Britain's most boring towns (and reasons to love them)

Telegraph

17-04-2025

We think of a boring town as somewhere with nothing to see or do. The historian Nikolaus Pevsner, obsessed with heritage, found dozens of urban centres uselessly devoid of distracting architecture during his perambulations.
A pub fiend is disappointed when a town has only a Spoons and a dodgy wine bar. A culture vulture requires galleries, theatres and cinemas. A gourmand wants a Michelin-starred tasting menu. Everyone's boredom is different.
But mass tourism is built around selling experiences. A fun place is one that appears to deliver the obvious. So, is a supposedly boring place a reflection of a dull person's want of enterprise and imagination?
The following seven unsung wonders are special. These are towns we collectively consider boring.
What does that tell us about such places, and ourselves? Would an effort to appreciate their understated assets be rewarded with illumination? Answers on a tedious screed please.
1. Stevenage: pioneering new town with a secret history
Stevenage is as close to Charing Cross as Gatwick Airport. Trains rather than planes define it in the popular imagination. It was designated as the first new town, setting a pattern for British living that took from several sources: the repetitiousness of terraced housing; the ease of movement and green spaces of the Garden City movement (Stevenage sits between Letchworth and Welwyn); the work ethic of the factory town; the rootlessness of the overspill estate. Basildon, Bracknell, Corby and Harlow would follow.
Stevenage's shopping precinct, plus surrounding car parks and bus station, built between 1956 and 1959, is one of the earliest examples in Europe of a fully pedestrianised public space. Since 1988, it's been a conservation area, notable, according to Historic England, 'for its uniformity, integrity and level of survival'.
Stevenage hides its history. It has Celtic, Roman and Saxon connections, is a market town, has medieval buildings, played a role in modern education, was an important staging post, had its own Great Fire in 1807, and was the birthplace of the Vincent motorcycle. Yet everyone knows it as 'Stevenage, where everyone is a commuter'.
Top tourist attraction: Parish church of St Andrew and St George
2. Surbiton: home of the good life
Don't blame Margo Leadbetter for Surbiton's reputation. Snooty she might have been, but she was also saucy. Tom and Barbara were irritatingly cute at times, but they were forward-thinking. Jerry was a commuting suit, but he had a certain dry swagger. The Good Life did not make Surbiton boring.
It was the metropolitan snob who furnished the myth in order to reinforce his/her own illusion of belonging to the inner-city 'hood' – Elephant, Hackney, Kilburn, etc. A town beyond the Tube system, not as famously posh as Wimbledon or Richmond, and with a name that looks a bit like 'suburb' was perfect for a lazy joke.
The fact that Surbiton sits on the Thames, is close to Home Park and Hampton Court, is handy for the Surrey Hills, has decent bars and restaurants and a handsome conservation zone, and is close to Kingston, which has better shops than parts of central London, was overlooked. And, with Reggie Perrin living in Norbiton next door, the two burbs were always destined to be patronised by pseuds. Surbiton will be forever boring for those who don't know it at all.
Top tourist attraction: Surbiton station
3. Alloa: ghosts of industry
The website ilivehere.co.uk claims to be satirical but reads a lot like all those Facebook forums in which people denigrate their hometown. In 2024, it described Alloa as 'culturally devoid and one of the most deprived places in Scotland'. Allegedly, the claim is based on a poll – the hard data is hard to find. It was, like all such things, picked up and recycled by the media.
Alloa, in Clackmannanshire in the Central Lowlands (which doesn't have quite the ring of 'the Bonnie Highlands'), struggles to get its character over. Wikipedia sums up its shopping options thus: 'Alloa is served by many food retailers including Iceland Frozen Foods, Tesco, Aldi, Lidl, Morrisons, Asda, Co-op Food and Farmfoods'. But the town has a certain grandeur.
The Town Hall, by Alfred Waterhouse (best known for the Natural History Museum in London and Manchester Town Hall), is stately. The medieval Alloa Tower is a stunner. There are half a dozen listed structures. But the port's commercial legacy is truly hefty, ranging from weaving to shipbuilding, foundries, printing, cooperage and coal. It isn't easy to throw the imagination 60 years back, but local historians have done the hard work, and to walk through Alloa, as through any former industrial town, is to walk with ghosts, memories and shadows. The wider area, known as the Inner Forth, is quite wild and beautiful.
Top tourist attraction: Alloa Tower
4. Runcorn: bridges to the past and future
Pass-through places don't get noticed. Runcorn, on the Cheshire side of the Mersey, is known to people in the North West principally as the home of the bridge that leads to North Wales – or bridges, rather, as the arched Runcorn Bridge, built in 1961, is now accompanied by the sweeping, cable-stayed Mersey Gateway Bridge, as well as a classic lattice-girder railway bridge.
Bridges mean bottlenecks and so the 'Runcorn Gap' (imagine if your town was defined by a void) was always happily left behind. Beyond it, you were on your way to the beach, castles, Snowdonia and chalet parks. The only other association is toxic fumes. Widnes, over the water, was the home of alkali manufacturing and ICI; its rugby league team is known as the Chemics. The chemical industry, along with tanning and soapmaking, spread to Runcorn, which became a centre of mustard gas production. Amazingly, prior to this it was a spa town, dubbed the 'Montpellier of the North' in the Georgian era.
Runcorn was designated a new town in 1964 and hitched to a larger scheme with Warrington four years later. The dream was never fully realised, but the ambition survives in a warren of cul-de-sacs and Bauhaus-esque terraces. You can still ride the number one or two round the 12-mile dedicated Busway, with its 'stations' and raised section at Shopping City (designed by Fred Roche of Milton Keynes fame).
The North West is the motorway centre of the UK, with more miles of highway than southern California. Runcorn is its heart and, unlike Los Angeles, also has the Manchester Ship Canal and the Mersey. Maybe speeding through is not such a necessity.
Top tourist attraction: Norton Priory Museum & Gardens
5. Grantham: birthplace of late capitalism
See the Newton statue. Look upstairs at the corner shop on North Parade – now a health and beauty shop – where the young Margaret Thatcher lived. See her bed at the little museum. Then… well, that's about it, tourism-wise, in the Lincolnshire town most famous for its LNER non-stops to King's Cross.
Of course, a town is more than its attractions, and Grantham has shops and cafés and barbers and butchers, but it doesn't have any really outstanding examples of them. There's a middling OK-ness about what's on offer, as if being in the centre of the nation – in a flat, sausage-making landscape – has levelled ambitions (Lincolnshire won the 'most boring county' title in a dubious 2023 online poll).
But Grantham is gripping in some respects. Maggie was transformative, disruptive, influential, iconic. To drift around Grantham wondering what seeded her version of market economics is mind-bending. Was it the Angel and Royal, the old coaching house pointing to the capital? Was it St Wulfric's magnificent steeple, piercing clouds and all fluffiness? Was it the grand Guildhall where her grocer dad was alderman? As a counter-narrative, Jason Williamson, a vocalist in the duo Sleaford Mods, spent his formative years in Grantham. In an interview, he said it was 'very white, kind of Right wing – the perfect kind of Brexit town… It was a pretty closed place, and it still is'.
It's interesting to consider that a 1980 Radio One survey which named Grantham the most boring town in Britain also put Whitstable in the top three. Today, Whitstable is considered trendy. Could Grantham be rebranded as a hip rural haven to which Londoners commute by train for fun, frolics and bohemian soirées at a speakeasy called Chez Maggie?
Top tourist attraction: Thatcher statue
6. Swindon: railway town extraordinaire
You can feel the atmosphere in the carriage change when the name is announced on the GWR train. Bristol: proper city. Bath: elegant city. Castle Cary: countryside. Reading: almost there. Swindon: boooor-riiiing, to the sound of a train horn, like the onomatopoeic one in Joyce's Ulysses.
Why is this? Perhaps Swindon fails to evoke the promises of its county. Wiltshire is all thatched roofs, back lanes, lofty tors and Arthurian fantasies. Instead of stone circles, which abound in these parts, Swindon has a roundabout (though we should note that it was voted number one circular junction by the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society).
Sure, as a railway town, Swindon was more about function, steam and noise, dirt and motion. But it is ironic that a rail passenger might feel underwhelmed by the name of Swindon. For this market town was turned into an industrial powerhouse by railway enterprise. Swindon Works did for the South of England what Crewe did for the North West, creating thousands of good jobs.
Swindon band XTC's entire oeuvre can be listened to as an evocation of the town's limited horizons. But the band got on the train and toured the world. In the glory days of steam and British Rail, Swindon built the modern world.
Top tourist attraction: Steam – Museum of the Great Western Railway
7. Lampeter: cliché-free Cymru
'I would have gone to Lampeter' used to be the answer to the question 'What would you have done if you'd got all Es in your A-levels?' It's not that rural Ceredigion is unpleasant. It's just that for someone aged 18-21 and ready to embark on the great multifarious adventure that is student life, Lampeter is all the things that the Sorbonne is not.
The problem, really, is that everywhere else here seems interesting: the Pembrokeshire Coast National Trail; St David's with its wonky cathedral; foodie town Narberth; lovely Laugharne, where Dylan Thomas lies. Lampeter's understatedness is so extreme it is almost overstating itself. Look on a map and you will see the town sits in a sea of green – and about as far from the actual sea as you can get in this peninsular corner.
The one great strength Lampeter has is its authenticity. Almost bereft of tourist attractions, it doesn't conform to any of the commercial strictures that draw English people to Wales. This is the real deal. In an Instagrammed, boxed-up, corny world, and in a country too often reduced to a tourist cliché, that's priceless.
Top tourist attraction: Welsh Quilt Centre.