Location
How To Find Me
My address is 9 The Gateway Woking Surrey GU21 5SN.
I live in a private road in an exclusive suburb between Woking and West Byfleet which is a Conservation Area and has been designated an Urban Area of Special Residential Character.
The house and garden backs onto the Basingstoke Canal which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI); it is a haven for all sorts of wildlife including robins, blackbirds, moorhens and swans. The area is surrounded by golf courses and near Horsell Common (which was made famous in HG Wells' book The War of the Worlds).
Woking is five minutes from junction 11 of the M25 (Woking/Chertsey), within easy reach of Chiswick, Richmond, Barnes, Wimbledon and Clapham as well as Heathrow and Gatwick Airports.
Woking is situated to the South West of London, just outside the M25 and near West Byfleet, Lightwater, Chobham, Guildford, Camberley, Staines and Weybridge and within easy reach of Dorking, Epsom, Farnham, Leatherhead, Reigate, Fleet, Basingstoke, Reading and Windsor.
There is plenty of free parking. Please either park on the gravel drive or directly outside the house if possible.
If you prefer to take the train, my home which is between Woking and West Byfleet train stations, is 25 minutes from London Waterloo, followed by a four minute taxi ride.
A Brief History of Woking
Woking is probably best known as the setting of HG Wells' science fiction novel "The War of the Worlds". The narrator is at an observatory in Ottershaw when explosions are seen on Mars. Later a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common.
In real life, Woking is well known as a railway town; Woking Common Station opened in 1838 and the town centre followed. By 1849 London was running out of space to bury its dead so a railway station - connnected directly to Waterloo - was opened at Brookwood. By 1854, Brookwood Cemetary was the largest cemetery in the world; 240,000 people have been buried there.
There were two stations in the cemetery itself: North for non-conformists and South for Anglicans. Their platforms still exist and today it is possible to enter the cemetery directly from Brookwood station. A military cemetery was added to Brookwood in 1917 which contains some of the dead from both World Wars.
Woking is home to the headquarters of McLaren Racing (who make cars for Formula One) and the oldest purpose-built mosque in Western Europe which was built in in 1889.
The Surrey History Centre in Woking was officially opened by The Prince of Wales in 1999. Woking's most famous son Paul Weller - who formed The Jam - was born in Sheerwater.
