Woking Wells Walk (Woking)

Member Name: paranormalhandy

Product:	Woking
Date:	06/06/09 (183 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: For fans, it's all there on your doorstep

Disadvantages: It can be a grim place, not set up for tourists

If you have never read, and loved, "The War of the Worlds", then this review may be a bit pointless. Just a warning.

I first had a Wellsian pilgrimage to Woking in 2005, arriving by rail from Waterloo on a late Sunday evening. The train journey down runs through the heart of the Home Counties, passing the bulk of Battersea Power Station and out through golf links and leafy suburbs. It seems as if the landscape has not changed much over the last hundred years, and it is roughly this railway line that Wells' Martians followed (going in the opposite direction) during their failed assault on Victorian London. Sadly, upon leaving Woking Station, any "Good Life"-esque image of English suburbia was quickly dissipated by the town's empty, heavy atmosphere - even on a Sunday night. It truly felt like Weller's "Town Called Malice" as we walked into a wedge-shaped corner shop, squeezed between Chertsey Road and Maybury Road, and bought some provisions. Teenagers stared at us, shell suits rustled, and we were both fairly glad to get into the taxi and make our way to our hotel.

(Incidentally, the Star Inn at Wych Hill was really rather wonderful when we stayed there in '05 - beautiful French food, a quiet atmosphere, and attentive and interesting staff. When we briefly returned in '07, it had gone downhill quite considerably - no food served on a Wednesday night (we ate takeaway pizza in the bar), dirty rooms, and a general feeling of disarray. According to their website, they are "under new management" (again) as of Feb '09, but since they still seem to be doing a constant stream of DJ nights and Ann Summers parties, I can't imagine we'll ever be returning).

The following morning, we were up early, and first of all took a taxi from Wych Hill out to Horsell Common ("goin' to see the Martians?" asked the driver). He dropped us off at the car park (good for dogwalkers and just plain dogging, apparently) and we made our way through the gentle pine forest of the Common. As someone who grew up in and around the Glens of Angus, I was quite shocked at how at home I felt in this most English areas of England: the light, sandy soil, the trees, and the gorse and heather have a politely Scottish aspect. Our first port of call was the "Sandpits" of Horsell Common, about 200 yards from the car park, and the precise point where HG Wells had his Martian "cylinder" crash land into the skin of the 1890s Earth. The pits are a wide bowl of yellow sand, about 100 mtrs across, with areas of water that apparently very rarely dry up. It really is nothing much to look at - but for a fan is roughly equivalent to visiting 221B Baker Street or finding the TARDIS in a lay-by. Surrounding the pits is a ring of trees with their great, billowing roots exposed in the eroding sand. It makes a great and dramatic natural ampitheatre (Jeff Wayne please note!)

A path then leads out of the Common and down onto Chertsey Road (the A320). Up on your right is the heath-side pub Bleak House (as featured in Alan Moore's comic book "reimagining" of "War of the Worlds", "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2") and our your left is the busy Five Roads Roundabout. This will lead you back into Woking, and other Wells-related sites. Please be careful when crossing this roundabout, as we found the large and fast lorries quite intimidating - and of course, with five roads, there is a lot of traffic to look out for! Rather than taking the main road back into Woking, we ended up taking the quieter Monument Road straight down into Maybury, the charming suburb that features very prominently in the "War of the World"'s opening chapters. The bridge over the Basingstoke Canal leads you down onto a towpath, which offers a very pleasant and peaceful alternative walk back into the centre of the town.

Rejoining Chertsey Road, and after a couple of hours spent in the Surrey countryside, we were suddenly faced with Woking's more monolithic side. As has been mentioned by other reviewers, the dead centre of town (as opposed to the middle-class housing that surrounds it) is uniformly depressing and oppressive: it is a New Town Development in all but name. Strangely, Woking's earlier growth in the second half of the nineteenth century resulted in some of the most pleasingly cozy architecture in Southern England (well, pleasing to everyone apart from Wells himself, who fantasised about razing these twee new villas to the ground under a Martian Heat Ray). I would be very surprised if anyone felt similarily romantic about the Peacocks Centre or Working Borough Council Offices in a hundred years time; it seems as if the middle of Woking has been (appropriately) invaded by a disfiguring cancer of concrete and glass, huge call centres and sprawling distribution hubs.

Keeping your head low, however, there is still a few things to see in the middle of town. We stopped for a drink at the Wetherspoon's pub on Chertsey Road (called "The H G Wells") which at that time of the morning was full of a bus party and few sullen looking regulars. Some didn't seem that pleased when I got my camera out and took a few photos of the smattering of "Wells-obilia" on display in the bar (the Wetherspoons' regulation information poster framed on the wall, a mural of the Martian's attack on Horsell in the toilets, and a fantastic brass statue of the Invisible Man). After a quick drink, we left and quickly tracked down probably Woking's most famous single "War of the Worlds" tourist attraction: Michael Cordon's twenty-foot-high metallic Martian scultpure, unveiled in 1998 by town's mayor, as part of the hundredth anniversary of the novel's publication. This can be found on Chobham Road, opposite British Home Stores, and consists of the incredibly photogenic main tripod statue, alongside a "cylinder" half buried in the precinct and circular plaques representing the bacteria that eventually wiped out the aliens. It is also on the main pedestrian thoroughfare connecting the town's Conference Centre (again, called "H G Wells") and the Peacocks ShoppingPrecinctg. Many photos can be taken of amusing juxtapositions between shoppers with bags and the looming alien invader! A quick look at the website Flickr shows that many people have had much fun with this over the last eleven years.

Aside from this bizarre and affecting example of public art, very little of the centre of Woking has any kind of character or eccentricity. Multi-national shops and Costabucks Coffee Houses are profligate - and it is only the marvellous church opposite Peacocks (as photographed above) and the outdoor market that are in anyway remarkable. (Incidentally, some tourist literature for Woking tries to promote the chocolate-box image of St. Peter's Church and the surrounding cottages as a representation of the centre of town - beware, this is actually "Old Woking", and is the pre-industrial centre of the town, about two miles to the south. It is very different).

Heading back through the town centre, we now made our way out onto Maybury Road. To get there, we just happened to cut down through Stanley Road, the street immortalised by Paul Weller with his 1995 solo album. Sadly, there is no sign of the house Paul grew up in now - and the whole area seems to be a rather stunted and uninteresting industrial estate. You should now find yourself on Maybury Road (which can also be reached via the junction with Chertsey Road, in front of the railway station). Maybury Road is a long, straight avenue of semi-detached housing, interspersed with hotels, garages and shops, lining the north side of the road, while the south side borders the railway to London. Roughly three-quarters of the way along, you will find the house which H G Wells rented with his second wife Catherine between 1895 and 1896. The newly-weds apparently furnished their home with nick-nacks borrowed from his mother-in-law, and in the upstairs bedroom Wells wrote early drafts of not only "The War of the Worlds", but also "The Invisible Man". By 1896, his fortunes are risen considerably ("The Time Machine" was his first best-seller), and H G and Catherine moved out of Woking after barely a year. A photograph of how the house looks now (along with its blue plaque) can be found on Wikipedia (it's actually one I took and upped to Flickr, and has been used without my permission, but hey, I'm rather flattered ... ) The house itself is rather modestl, reflecting Wells' financial situation at the time (a struggling artist, recently divorced, shacked up with one of his ex-students) and has clearly undergone some renovation work between the Wars. It now seems more mid-1930s than late Victorian. Remember, though, it is a private residence, so don't dawdle too long ...

Making your way further along Maybury Road, you will end up at the junction with Maybury Hill. Looking left, you will see the small bridge and the towpath back down to the Basingstoke Canal. We have gone full circle. So instead, turn right and start heading up the Hill. Interestingly, it is in this area of Woking, rather than the road Wells actually lived on, that he placed his narrator's home - Maybury Hill. It is interesting to speculate that he did this out of pure wish-fulfillment: he was stuck in a pokey house between the railway line, the gas works, and the overgrown canal, while on the other side of the train tracks massive mansions and villas were being built up the Hill, for the more financially successful men of Woking ...

Sadly, the next big landmark, the Oriental College, the destruction of which Wells' narrator watches from his garden, no longer exists. In its old grounds now stands a shopping centre off Oriental Road, with a Halfords and an Argos. Further along Oriental Road can be seen the minarets of Woking Mosque, the country's first, another building destroyed by the Martians in "The War of the Worlds". Beyond the roundabout, you now find yourself in Maybury Hill "proper" - a prosperous-feeling suburb of massive houses and even larger gardens, which slowly rises to a summit still featuring the odd grove of pine trees dating back to the time this was an extension of Horsell Common. Between the leaves and needles can be spotted a large, white house on the left side of the road - Maybury Knowle - which is seen by many as being the house Wells envisaged for his narrator. Sadly, the house wasn't even built until 1903, five years after "War of the World's" publication (although one of its earliest inhabitants was George Bernard Shaw). It seems that no specific house was picked by Wells as his setting - although a quick read of the text suggests the imaginary house is probably a few hundred yards to the south-west, overlooking the Mosque. At the summit of Maybury Hill, turn round and look back down the incline: you can see the former site of the college, the railway viaduct (where, in the novel, soldiers were billeted to stop the advancing Martians), the bridge over the Basingstoke Canal, and the green-yellow haze of the Common in the background. This is the view described so exactly by Wells in those early chapters.

Finally, make you descent down the other side of the Hill. It is a gentle walk and a five minute's distance to the Maybury Inn, and the bottom of the incline (those driving around Woking may also note there is a petrol station there). The Inn is a clean and friendly place (although, sadly, the "swinging sign", mentioned specifically in the novel as the narrator and his wife make their escape in a horse and trap, no longer exists). Here, we ended our first long trek around the Wells sites of Woking, and were treated to a very pleasant, down-to-earth pub meal of cheeseburgers and chips. Again, it seems that the Maybury Inn has undergone new management over the last four years, so I cannot vouch for it now. (Incidentally, of the other two pubs in the area mentioned in the novel, the College Arms closed in 2007, and is now being converted into flats; and the Princess (renamed "The Spotted Dog" in the novel) looks like a total dive).

We returned to Woking in 2007, again (this time, sadly) staying at the Star Inn in Wych Hill. This time we spent most of our time sight-seeing in London and going to gigs, but on our last day in the town we had another hunt round War of the Worlds sites (although this time at a more leisurely pace). Walking down to the middle of town on a crisp and beautiful mid-November morning, we took a shortcut along the achingly twee York Road and after a few minutes lost and wandering round a car park we found ourselves at the underpass on Victoria Way. Here can be seen two murals, one of George Bernard Shaw and one of H G Wells. Both have long been grafittied, though, seemingly with tins of red paint hurled at them. After a few hours spent at the outdoor market (an interesting mix of shops and fooderies) we headed back up to Cordon's Martian statue, which was just as breathtaking and comically surreal as it was the first time we saw it two and a half years before. This time, we turned left at the Martians' legs, and walked up Chobham Road towards Victoria Way. Underneath the dual carriageway and its large roundabout is another underpass, this time for pedestrians and cyclists only, which takes you through to the second, longer and busier section of Chobham Road, heading out to Horsell Common. This road, which runs into Kettlewell Hill as it snakes through the suburbs, is the route that the Martians took in the novel, from their landing site to the destruction of the railway station, and it is for this reason that the Martian statue is set on this road, marching into town.

The underpass below Victoria Way is another War of the Worlds highlight, featuring a long mural or either side, depicting scenes from the novel in a garishly-coloured, stylised fresco. Sadly, the underpass itself is ill-lit and would not be a place you'd want to linger near at night - but during the day, as long as you take reasonable precautions, you should be free to take in the mural in all its glory (and no, there isn't much grafitti, either). On emerging from the otherside of Victoria Way, you can now rejoin Chobham Road and head over the Basingstoke Canal (on Wheatsheaf bridge, where Wells' narrator is greeted with derision from locals when he tells them about what has happened on the Common).

It is now up to you how far you want to walk up Chobam Road. We had picked up a couple of cycling guide books, specifically "War of the Worlds" themed, from the Tourist Information Centre that morning (since Wells wrote the book with recourse to OS maps and his newly-learned skill of cycling, it seemed appropriate). Even though the guides say they are also suitable for pedestrians, we found that the second half of Kettlewell Hill did not have a pavement, so we had to turn back and head down beside Nuffield Hospital to the edge of Horsell Common instead. By now, it was getting cold and dark, and we soon turned round and headed back along Chobham Road to the Wheatsheaf pub, which is approximate 500 metres to the north of Basingstoke Canal.

The Wheatsheaf is another pub featured in "War of the Worlds" - the astronomer Ogilvy, the first man to see the Martian Cylinder, is locked up in a tap room by the landlord, who assumes by his rantings that he is mad. In real life, the Wheatsheaf, opposte Wheatsheaf Common, is a very pleasant inn - with surprisingly good food. It also does accommodation, but from their website the rooms look small and cramped, and I don't think I would recommend it. The fire is warm, though; and in November at 5pm that is a big consideration!

And with that, we finished our second, and so far final, tour of War of the Worlds sites in Woking. I gather that there are occasional "official tours" of these sites, organised by the Borough Council, happening on Bank Holiday weekends and the like, although I don't know anyone who's ever tried one. Hopefully, with this review, fans (and the mildly interested) can retrace the Martians' tripod-steps and enjoy the more beautiful areas of this over-looked and much-derided Home Counties conurbation.

Summary: A tour around the sites used in the novel "War of the Worlds" in Woking