Kingston-upon-Thames. I was there early one Saturday morning in the middle of January and with that grey sky, it looked and felt like somewhere in the Midlands, or perhaps Yorkshire. That's just not a southern English bridge.
It was extensively re-developed by Town Planners in the 1980s and 90's, and those guys had the architectural taste of, well, local council town planners. In contrast the riverside development at Richmond is at least an attempt to do vernacular. (Vernacular in Richmond is quite posh, of course.) Kingston is busy, and it has a lot of the shops you want, and a John Lewis, but it was not designed to look pleasant on the outside. It was not designed to be a place.
It looks like someone bombed it flat and then private developers were allowed to dump whatever they wanted wherever they wanted, with no obligation to create a public space with character.
But it could have been the grey sky. I drove back via Hampton Court, and everything felt like I was two hundred miles north of the Thames.
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