My town of Woking, now of 90,000 souls, was really established about 170 years ago when the railway linking London and Southampton came, and later grew in importance when it became the junction for the line to Portsmouth. The station built back in those times served the community then known as Woking a couple of miles distant. But at this time in Victorian England, there was a high death rate caused by bad sanitation and disease and it was decided to construct a large cemetery out in the countryside as London itself was getting far too crowded for such land use. This was built at nearby Brookwood, and was in fact served by special trains carrying the dead from London-Waterloo to its own station in the cemetery.

It was subsequently discovered that far too much land had been bought for the cemetery and this was gradually sold off and eventually became the modern town of Woking; this being centered on the railway station. The original village of Woking is now called Old Woking, today being the neighbourhood at the town’s southern edge.

The legacy of it being built by the railway, meant that the town’s High Street only had shops on one side, the other consisting of a drab concrtete wall being the peripheries of the station structure.

Although the High Street lost its importance as a shopping street 30 years ago, the town did decide to do something about that drab concrete wall, and commissioned a mural illustrating the town’s Edwardian past.

So here we have it, with a little bit of the 21st century thrown in.


Photoshop:
Cropped and Resized
Selective desaturation
Contrast upped 20%
Framed using #FFFFFF

On 21 November last year; ‘The Village’