New London, New Hampshire

New London sits on a ridge in the Sunapee region of western New Hampshire, a town chartered in seventeen seventy-nine that grew into a classic New England college community. Colby-Sawyer College, founded in eighteen thirty-seven as the New London Academy, anchors the town's compact center and shapes its character as an intellectual and cultural hub well above its modest size.

Accounts of the name differ, but the town is generally said to honor London, England. The ridge location, four to five hundred feet above the surrounding lakes region, gave it clean air and a reputation in the nineteenth century as a healthy summer retreat.

New London never industrialized heavily. No falls, no major river, no railroad depot. That relative isolation preserved its village character even as nearby towns changed. Today it remains one of the more intact and walkable small New England town centers in the state, built around a green, the college, and a few blocks of nineteenth-century commercial buildings that look much as they did a hundred years ago.