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Unromantic places where famous Frenchmen were exiled: Zola lived briefly in Upper Norwood, Verlaine in Bournemouth and Napoleon III in Chiselhurst. Esterhazy - the real traitor and villain in the Dreyfus Affair - shaved off his moustache and fled to England where he published anti-Semitic journalism under the name of Jean de Voilemont and lived in Harpenden, which was then a village.
Joseph Conrad lived in the village of Stanford-le-Hope, which sounds romantic but was not, when I was there as a boy, romantic at all, but the most depressing collection of 1960s public housing imaginable. He writes about nearby Gravesend in the opening to Heart of Darkness. Not far away is Barking, where Arnold Schwarzenegger lived in 1963 for a year, when it was very white.
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