December 1994 - The deathly charms of Woking

Ever since a survey by the Reward Group, a firm of pay analysts, named Woking as the most expensive town in the UK, I have found myself enduring the odd nudge and wink from colleagues suggesting that I 'must have a bob or two' to live there.

They make the common mistake of equating expense with wealth, their theory being that if something is expensive you must be wealthy in order to buy it. Expense and wealth, however, have rarely made a lasting relationship as compatible bedfellows. Wealth and thrift are a better match, perhaps, leaving expense to elope with stupidity.

Here, in Woking, are all the answers to those questions posed by economists and politicians about the lack of any feelgood factor as the UK emerges from recession. Here you can find genuine old-style Dickensian misery, as householders, weighed down by mortgages, loans and school fees, make their Micawber calculations, end in deficit, and pray that something will turn up.

Woking has one of the biggest colonies outside the capital of that semi-troglodyte sub-species - the commuter. You see us in the twilight hours at either end of the day flocking on to dirty trains to Waterloo station and the City where we grub out our high five-figure and sometimes six-figure salaries.

Pallid features, furrowed foreheads and greying temples are the hallmark of unfettered slavery, resigned adherence to the worship of work as the only source of keeping the head above water. What they so unconvincingly mask is not so much worries over negative equity - most of the souls with that particular torment have long since found their release in repossession - but totality of equity tied into property which cannot be released without a realignment in their domestic circumstances. They are not as wealthy as they think they are. Deep down they know it and it is the cause of real unhappiness.

Some find relief on the journey home from work. I was told of one commuting pack, travelling together, who sit in the buffet car and religiously down a whisky at every station from Waterloo that starts with the letter 'W'. After Wimbledon, Walton-on-Thames, Weybridge and West Byfleet their cares have disappeared. You have to admire the constitution of the one who passes Woking and gets off at nearby Worplesdon.

Filing off the train with all the other commuters at Woking railway station any evening of the working week, it would be easy to conclude from the vacant, fatigued expressions that you had joined the ranks of the living dead. It has not always been so. Woking's original pioneer settlers were just plain dead.

To understand this point we must go back just over 150 years to the laying of the London-to-Southampton railway line, which passed through Woking, at that time no more than an agricultural community of neighbouring villages, all smocks, straw and pantiles.

The railway arrived just at the point that London was struggling with a chronic shortage of burial land. Two entrepreneurs, Sir Richard Broun and Richard Sprye produced a plan for what they called the London Necropolis - a 400-acre city of the dead, designed to be the mother and father of all cemeteries that would serve London's needs for years to come.

It needed a Parliamentary Bill to make it happen. The result was Brookwood cemetery, then quaintly named the Glades of Remembrance, on the edge of what became Woking town. They even built a branch line into the cemetery. Thus the first commuters using Woking arrived on one-way tickets from London.

The hearse trains, with vans segregated according to class and religion, used a specially built terminus in London. The train ran until it was destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the second world war.

It was no coincidence that Britain's first public crematorium was also built in the town at a time that burial was regarded as the only accepted form of disposing of the dead. Burning was proscribed by the Church and untested in law. Enthusiasts, however, formed the Cremation Society, which celebrated a legal judgment in favour of the method by cremating one of its dearly departed members, a Mrs Pickersgill, in Woking in 1885, the first legal cremation in the UK if you do not count burnings at the stake.

Perhaps it was the same tranquil surroundings that appealed so much to the recently bereaved that also attracted London's money-makers. Woking soon found itself the buckle of the stockbroker belt as of one London's most important satellite towns.

Every few years as London's belly bulged, the belt would loosen a notch to take in embryonic commuters. More and more trains fed the City's voracious appetite for office workers to the stage that they were pulling out of Woking station with the frequency of a London underground train at the height of the Lawson boom in the late 1980s.

Now, however, the buckle is very much tightening as families who bought their houses at that time struggle to shake off the mood of austerity resulting from by falling house prices. When prices rose, they went up rapidly. When prices came down they slumped; nothing sudden, but on a slow slide on a downward curve over the last four or five years.

On the estate where I live - a recent development - the houses are fetching about £100,000 less today than the price asked by the builder when they had just been erected.

Yet still people come here; attracted mostly by the easy commuting, perhaps, and the proximity of London's two biggest airports - Heathrow and Gatwick. Maybe, also, there is another attraction, something to do with the town's plain ordinariness and anonymity.

This might explain Woking's other funereal connection. Not only is it noted for its disposals after demise, it has also attracted notoriety in the business of dispensing death.

First it was the Sicilian Mafia. Francesco Di Carlo, one of Sicily's top Mafia bosses, lived here for a while with his two large German shepherd dogs. But Woking could have been cosier for the Cosa Nostra. Di Carlo was rumbled as the head of a £75m heroin smuggling ring and jailed in 1987; not the sort of character with whom you would want to engage in a neighbourly dispute over the hedge trimmings.

Just when we thought it was safe to mow the lawn again, I was doing just that in May when I heard the gunshot of what police later decided was a Chechen mafia hitman as he murdered a housewife on her doorstep about two estates away in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

Having recently erected a 'No dogs allowed' sign on our private estate, it may be time to consider the addition of another declaring 'Mafia-free zone'.

So come to Woking if you want to witness the symptoms of our endemic national depression. They say it is the most expensive town in the UK. There are better places to live, for sure, but you must agree there are worse places to die.

© Financial Times, 1994

See also: “Of Woking, boats and world war"