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Woking Leasing

Did You Know?

Woking is a town and borough in northwest Surrey, England, around 23 mi from central London. It appears in Domesday Book as Wochinges and its name probably derives from that of a Saxon landowner.

Woking is one of the largest town's in Surrey and is known as the landing place for the aliens in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The town boasts the country's oldest mosque, the Shah Jahan, the innovative Lightbox art and heritage centre, and motorsport legends McLaren. It is also the home town of The Jam.

Eric and Alec Bedser, the famous twins, were six months old when their father moved his family to Woking, where they lived for the rest of their lives. The twins were educated at Maybury Junior School and Monument Hill Secondary School, and the family attended All Saints' Church in Woodham where the twins sang in the choir.

In the 1970s, there was no church in the centre of Woking and services were held in a room above a shop in Chertsey Road.

At certain times, floods have plagued Woking and the surrounding area. The twentieth century started off with the worst floods for over forty years. In some houses, the occupants had to camp upstairs as the water was several feet deep.

In the 1940s, Sir William Grove, a professor of physics at the London Institute, developed the idea of a fuel cell. In the 1940s, Over 150 years later, Woking utilised his idea, becoming the first borough in the country to be powered by a fuel cell.

In May 1895, H. G. Wells moved to Woking with his new wife; they lived in Lynton in Maybury Road. While there, he wrote his most famous book, War of the Worlds, which was published in 1898.

In the seventeenth century, James I granted the manor of Woking to Sir Edward Zouche. On Monument Hill, near the canal, he erected a six-foot tower that loomed over the area. Sadly, for him, it collapsed in the 1860s during a violent storm.

Although only 25 miles from London, a green belt area surrounds Woking. There is an abundance of wooded areas, which contain a great number of ancient pine trees. Legend says that it was Sir Edward Zouche who introduced pine trees into Woking in the seventeenth century. 

The Salvation Army was established in Woking in the nineteenth century and, in 1897, the Salvation Army hall was officially opened on an empty site on the corner of Church Street and Clarence Avenue.

Ethel Smyth was born on April 23, 1858 in Sidcup, Kent. She studied music and became a prolific composer; she wrote songs, piano music, orchestral and choral works and operas. She moved to Hookheath in Woking at the beginning of the twentieth century and lived there for the rest of her life.

She died in 1944 at her home in Hookheath at the age of 86. Her brother, Bob, a brigadier in the British Army, scattered her ashes near the Woking Golf Club where she had often played.