New town, old country

Cranbrook is a new town in the making, a few miles outside Exeter. Where there were just a couple of farms there are now hundreds of houses, a shop, a pub (fake rustic but actually rather good) and more community resources planned, including a "town centre"! In fact the middle of the settlement is a country park that sweeps between the two large estates and connects with open-ish country. It's probably already more diverse than the farmland was.
What it may lack in character (my niece said "Stepford Wives" and I thought "Truman Show") it makes up for in affordability. My niece and her husband could never have bought a three-bedroom house in a pleasant part of Exeter, much less in Honiton where they lived previously. Here, with a lot of help from the bank of dad-in-law, they were able to manage it. 
Extras show an air ambulance training call that happened to coincide with my visit, a range of listed cowsheds just over the garden wall, and my niece explaining to the dogs for the umpteenth time that there's a baby on the way and things will change.