Open Writing

We have started to research the walk I'm planning for a group of former FT journalists who call themselves “the old lags.” I can’t get to all of the walks, mostly in the London area, but offered to host one from Woking Station, just 25 minutes down the line from London’s Waterloo Station.

The challenge is to get out of the urban environment to offer some rural, or at least semi-rural walking with a pub for lunch. Anyone who has visited Woking - on the fringe of the M25 - might see that as a tall order.

Woking eased itself comfortably in to the book of Crap Towns http://idler.co.uk/category/crap-towns/ . It is utterly lacking in charm and seems to be run by people whose architectural vision does not extend beyond concrete tower blocks and multi-storey car parks. Yet every town has something to offer.

In the late 1990s Woking decided to exploit its literary heritage, hence the sculpted interpretation of a Martian tripod in the town centre in tribute to H G Wells and his science fiction novel, War of the Worlds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds Wells lived in the town when he wrote the book that drew on some of the local features, specifically the sand pits on nearby Horsell Common. So the tripod can be an early photo call on the five-minute walk from the station to the Basingstoke canal.

The canal tow path, which nudges up against the ring road, will take us within 15 minutes to a hidden bit of Woking, the site of three Bronze age burial mounds http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=5029 right on the edge of the town. When we visited, the biggest and best of these was charred and littered with rubbish from old camp fires on he crown of its mound

A little further in to the woods and we came across the Muslim burial ground (pictured above). This is a small enclosure that up to 1968 contained the remains of 24 Indian army soldiers who had served with the British and Commonwealth forces in WWI and WWII. These were soldiers who had died from their wounds in British hospitals. This former Commonwealth war grave was established so that it was close to one of the UK’s oldest mosques, the Shah Jahan Mosque http://www.shahjahanmosque.org.uk/02history.html that can be seen on the left as you come in to Woking on the train from Waterloo. The graveyard is a reminder that muslims have give their lives for this country and are still prepared to do so. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12504162

The graves were moved to Brookwood Cemetery (one of the reasons that Woking exists, recalled in this feature http://www.richarddonkin.com/archive_woking.htm when they were repeatedly vandalised. There is nothing but grass inside the walls now.

We walked on to Horsell Common and the sand pits that Wells decided would make an ideal location for a Martian landing. It was here in the book, that curious locals gathered around a half-buried machine before the author ensured that most of the area was obliterated in the ensuing war.

I wonder if Wells could not resist the potential for destroying this place in his imagination. I can't blame him. As John Betjamin wrote of Slough in his famous poem, "It isn't fit for humans now." One uniting feature of this quite impressive list of people with Woking connections http://www.woking.gov.uk/woking/people/halloffame is that most of them got out of the place as soon as they could.

I'm thinking we might make it to Chobham but we didn't get so far yesterday on foot, although we did drive out to a good locals pub in the village. There's plenty of traditional Surrey heathland around Horsell but a lot of it is churned up by muddy paths. I suppose I could take people to the south of the town and the remains of Woking's Royal Tudor Palace that looked like this http://www.woking-palace.org/palace/history/thehistory.htm in Henry VIII's time. Today there's a bit of a wall http://www.woking-palace.org/palace/palacenow.htm and that's about it. But I'll save that delight for another time, should anyone want to return.