What is "flaxborough"

Flaxborough is a fictitious town in Lincolnshire, created by author and local journalist Colin Watson as the background for a series of detective novels (The Flaxborough Chronicles) featuring Detective Inspector Walter Purbright and a cast of similar comic characters.

Flaxborough cannot be precisely identified with any real town from the texts. It was a Borough, with a borough police force and Chief Constable, a yacht club, and docks. It is often identified with Boston. But it also had a Cathedral, suggesting identification with Lincoln itself - although Lincoln, or rather Lincoln Jail, explicitly gets mentioned too. The descriptions of the townscape, and in particular Lucilla Teatime's antiques business or charity offices, most closely resemble Louth.

In the BBC television adaptation Murder Most English, most locations were filmed in Spalding.