Bridge shut? Then so's the town.

Dartford is famous for the Crossing, so it's famous for traffic. Something goes wrong on the bridge and the whole town grinds to a halt. Everyone shops out of town instead, the High Street is dying, the takeaways have dodgy hygiene ratings and some bright spark's smashing up the bus stops. Gravesend says Dartford is worse. Dartford disagrees.

Sit in that queue and you're breathing 1.8 times the typical town's nitrogen dioxide. It hardly ever rains, 108 days a year, so nothing washes it away either. And the council recycles under a quarter of its household waste. Nothing in Dartford goes round again except the M25.

The editor, still technically on the approach road