Most of what you see in Woking today
has come in the last 150 years – in the middle of the town there
are very few buildings more than 40 years old. But Woking
does have a history. There are three burial mounds
on Horsell Common which are 3000 years old and there was a small
Roman settlement east of Old Woking. About 1300 years ago
monks came from Chertsey and built a church, probably where Old
Woking church is now, to serve the whole district. Vikings
destroyed this but by 1066 it had been rebuilt and a small village
grew around it.
Apart from land along the River Wey
which could be used for agriculture most of the area of the modern
borough was heathland – like Horsell and Chobham Commons. There
were isolated farms and small churches at Horsell, Pyrford, Sutton
and Byfleet and by 1300 some of the richer people and servants of the
king had built larger manor houses in these places (but not
Horsell). The kings loved hunting and large areas formed
‘forest’ which meant they were kept for the court to hunt deer
and the local people had few chances to improve themselves. The
manors at Woking and Sutton grew more important and were often owned
by the king; at Woking Henry VIII rebuilt the old house as a small
palace and often entertained his court and foreign visitors there: at
Sutton the Weston family were given the manor and built Sutton Place,
one of the first large houses built in brick and not with any means
of defence.
Woking Palace was not used much after
the time of Henry VIII and after James I sold it the building was
demolished to build Hoe Place and other houses around Woking. The
Weston family built canals and locks along the River Wey so that
boats could reach from the Thames as far as Guildford and this meant
that Old Woking grew into a small town. With this
improvement in transport some market gardens opened on the heath to
provide vegetables for London, which was growing rapidly, and by the
end of the 18th century it was found that while the soil was
poor it was good for growing plants such as rhododendrons and several
plant nurseries opened, mostly lasting until the late 20th century.
In 1838 the railway reached Woking
Common, on the site of the present station, on its way from London to
Southampton and in 1845 a branch line opened to Guildford. Woking
Station thus became an important junction for goods and passenger
traffic, and London could now be reached within an hour. This
did not bring an instant growth to the town, but it was now easy to
reach London and there was a lot of land around the station which had
little value for agriculture and was therefore cheap to buy from the
Earls of Onslow, who owned the commons. First
to realise this were those who saw that the London
graveyards were becoming overcrowded and unhealthy: in 1852 the
London Necropolis Company was formed to acquire land for burials out
of town and came to buy 2000 acres of land based on Brookwood. The
cemetery laid out on 400 of those acres was, and is, the largest
private cemetery in Europe, and taking advantage of the railway
passing by they ran trains for coffins and mourners from a special
station near Waterloo into the cemetery where there were two
stations. These special trains stopped when bombed in
1941.
The Necropolis Company had a lot of
land they did not need for burials and soon began to sell it to
others who saw the need for buildings on cheap land, near the railway
but not too near anything else – so Woking by the 1870s had a
splendid home for retired actors (the Royal Dramatic College, of
which more later), the expanded Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (later
renamed Brookwood Hospital, and one of the first mental hospitals
which tried to understand problems of mental health) and two prisons,
one for invalid men, the other for women. Other land was
sold near the station, but in small portions, with no proper
planning, and some rather ordinary streets of shops and houses grew
along the roads to Chertsey, Chobham, Guildford, St John’s and
Maybury. South of the station ground was sold for larger
houses, but nothing else.
Not all these grand projects
succeeded. The Royal Dramatic College ran short of money
by 1877 and after being empty for some years was bought by Dr
Gottlieb Leitner, who founded the Oriental Institute as a centre
for oriental studies in England, both for the English and visitors
and residents from the east. He built a mosque in the
grounds – the first purpose-built mosque built in Western Europe
since the 1500s, and although it closed for some years after his
death it was re-opened in 1912 and was a centre for Muslims in
Britain for many years, attracting many immigrants from Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and Uganda, to Woking from the 1960s onwards. After
much successful work the Brookwood Hospital finally closed in 1994 as
mental problems began to be treated in the community rather than in
large institutions, and the site has been redeveloped with
Sainsbury’s and Homebase, but some of the original buildings
becoming flats and the chapel a Buddhist temple. The
prisons were gone by the 1890s, becoming Inkerman Barracks, which
closed in the 1980s, to be demolished or converted to housing.
Two later large projects were the
Crematorium at St John’s, the first crematorium built in Britain,
opening in 1885, and the orphanage for the children of railway
workers transferred from Clapham in 1911, and partly
maintained by donations made to dogs which patrolled main stations
with collecting boxes on their backs. The Crematorium
continues but the orphanage has now been demolished and houses as
well as a smaller home for retired railway workers built on the site.
Meanwhile the new town around the
station continued to grow, with the addition of churches, a hospital,
public buildings, halls and cinemas, and the smaller settlements such
as Kingfield, St John’s, Knaphill and Brookwood also grew on a
modest scale: Old Woking, left behind by the railway and north of the
present A3 grew very little until industrial estates came after World
War 2. Byfleet and Horsell both acquired rows of shops and
West Byfleet started from a church at the corner to become the
largest of the centres outside Woking town. Plans to
develop a site for light industry and to rebuild in the centre of
Woking had to stop with the outbreak of World War 2 and until 1975
the centre of Woking was a large car park. From 1950
Sheerwater was built on woodland and heath to house people from
London which was becoming overcrowded, and also became a centre for
industry, being the first Woking home of the McLaren motor racing
works.
Woking was by now
not only an ideal commuter town for London, with frequent trains, but
was also becoming a business and industrial centre in its own right,
with its population reaching 80,000 (it is now 90,700). In
1975 the first shopping mall, Wolsey Place, was built, along with a
new library, swimming pool, theatre and halls and the Town square
took shape, with the war memorial moved to its centre from ‘Sparrow
Park’. As the nursery land became Goldsworth Park, then
the largest private housing estate in Europe, further building in the
town centre was necessary by the 1990s and the Peacocks shopping
complex was built, along with the Ambassadors, including the New
Victoria Theatre and a three (later six) screen cinema. The
library was rebuilt and the swimming pool moved to Woking Park. More
office buildings and housing came along Victoria Way, the relief road
built in the 1970s, as well as in Goldsworth Road and south of the
station. Throughout the 1970s there had been calls for a
branch of M & S, a hotel and a museum: M & S came to the
Peacocks and left in 2009, the Holiday Inn to Victoria Way (with an
efficient district heating system) and in September 2007 The Lightbox
opened as a museum, art gallery and cultural centre for all the
people of Woking.
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