Picking up on the Bloomsbury thread, but going off at a tangent and not wanting to disrupt that thread...what do people think about using real locations in novels?
My story location is both real and not. Key features are inspired by the Malverns, as would be apparent to anyone reading it who knew them. But I've cheated and taken big liberties, not wanting to be contrained by the real life geographical constraints. Choices, choices. To use a real town, as many authors do, grit and veracity and a local tourism marketing angle thereby, Morse and Oxford now go together for Morse fans, but with the risk of having every error pointed out, or someone deciding that your character is based on them (and is maybe libellous :) ) Or make it both harder and easier on yourself....with a landscape invented from scratch, though there is nothing new under the sun, so unless it's speculative fantasy, people might still try guessing the 'real' location. anyway. More pros and cons, people?
I write military HF (Napoleonic period) so of necessity my locations are real. Except...I've never been to any of them, so my descriptions are based on maps and imagination. My MCs home village in Gloucestershire is imagined, though of course it might have been abandoned since - many villages were. And in the latest story I invented a Spanish town because of the not-so-pleasant, and fictional, events which happened there.
I think it depends on what your story needs. Inventing a city for a drama set in the present-day might be awkward because of readers' knowledge-base, though a village would work because there are so many most will never have heard of. And as Jennifer Harvey said, you can always invent a new area in a real location.
I sometimes use real places but maybe don't go into to much detail of the area in which I am writing and other times I invent names for a place but have a particular real place in mind. The location of the place may also move so that it doesn't read to close to home, so to speak.
All the hometowns in my series are imagined, but all the travel destinations are of course real. That's mainly because I needed the hometowns to be a particular shape or size with a distinct location. It's possible that in some cases the towns I required existed, but I saw the fictional towns first and built them to suit. Considering how much research I had to do into each of the cities my travelling couple visited, that was definitely the right thing for me to do. Had I made every location a real one, my research would have needed to be extensive and would have begun to pull me away from the serious business of actually telling a story.