Marlow

An attractive commuter town on the banks of the Thames, Marlow is famous for its suspension bridge built in 1832 to the design of Tierney Clarke, who built a similar bridge linking Buda and Pest across the Danube. The High Street is lined with elegant houses, and Marlow has a good supply of riverside pubs. In one of them, The Two Brewers, Jerome K Jerome wrote his masterpiece, Three Men in a Boat. Other literary connections abound: Mary Shelley completed Frankenstein while living here after her marriage to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and TS Eliot lived for a while in West Street, as did the author Thomas Love Peacock while writing Nightmare Abbey. Marlow hosts an annual regatta and is one of the places the Swan Uppers visit each year counting and marking the swans belonging to the Queen and to two London Livery Companies.