Sid James, Dusty Springfield and Fred Perry all lived in Ealing, a green oasis, which, incidentally, has London just up the road. There's a good shopping centre, a pretty green and a gothic-style town hall. Trees line the spacious streets and you're never far from delightful open spaces. All this is deliberate: in an early exercise in brand-building, Ealing invented the soubriquet 'Queen of Suburbs' to highlight its abundance of parks. Ealing has a rich cultural mix, which includes Irish and Asian families, Japanese and Arabs and is also the centre of London's large Polish community.