The name has been used in sitcoms and films and even features in a song by Iron Maiden.

To some this cosy view of suburbia may seem a stifling nightmare; others may merely regard it as slightly infra dig. But in the 60 real Acacia Avenues, it is the closest thing to bliss they are likely to find between the dog eared covers of their A to Z.

People living in Acacia Avenues are happy with their lives, rarely get divorced and have been in the same job for 11 years, according to a three-month survey of more than 200 people living in 15 Acacia Avenues.

Participants in the survey included Mary Quant’s dressmaker, a retired Belgian basketball player, a paganist Civil War re-enactor and a rabbit called Blossom. Four in ten residents have degrees, making them better educated than average, and the single biggest employer is the NHS, with more than one in ten (14 per cent) residents working for it.

The average Acacia Avenue worker earns about the national average, £22,500, works 36 hours a week, and takes just 21 minutes to get to their office or factory.

Four out of ten say fish and chips is their favourite meal, most houses have a garden and three bedrooms and residents tend to be families and older couples.

One in five has a garden shed and almost one in ten had bought a garden gnome. Just over half go abroad for one week a year, with Spain the most popular destination. Kevin Sinclair, managing director of AA Insurance which commissioned the survey, said that he hoped the results would help the company to gain a better understanding of its average customer in “middle Britain”. He said: “When we wanted to get a better understanding of our ‘average’ customer, we turned away from the spreadsheets, switched off the computer down and took to the road.”

The findings may provide some comfort for the Government, which aims to instigate a suburban renaissance and increase housing density, particularly around the edges of built-up areas, in order to counter the housing shortage and to develop sustainable communities.

The think-tank Demos has also recently announced a “save suburbia” campaign, amid fears that the suburban idyll of Middle England, once celebrated by Sir John Betjeman, is in desperate decline after decades of neglect from policymakers who have instead championed the countryside and inner cities.

Demos’s campaign includes plans to reinvigorate Acacia Avenues by reinventing the Tupperware party and encouraging groups of men to join together in car-washing circles.

Such policies fly in the face of a growing body of evidence which suggests that middle Britain is sick to the teeth of suburban life. New figures out this week show that 110,000 people a year — an increase of 25 per cent on 2000 — are now fleeing town and suburbs for the countryside.

A survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) found that no other type of community is so widely rejected by its residents: while 42 per cent of the population lives in suburbs, only 26 per cent say they want to. But in Acacia Avenue, such gloom and doom is anathema: only six per cent say they would like to live somewhere else.

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