Cranes, Woking

Woking has been a building site as long as I've been here. It must have been a pleasant little railway town once, a long time ago, before the planners caught the high rise virus. You need scale to build upwards and large spaces below the blocks. But in Woking they just built above the narrow streets. The town is placed perfectly for commuters, taking in the Portsmouth and Southampton lines up to Waterloo, just 23 minutes away. This means that a lot of people sleep here but they don't really live here. I hardly got to know the town in the years I worked in London.

Woking has strong associations with death. One of the country's largest cemeteries is sited on the edge of the town. In fact that's how the town came to exist. London dumped its dead here. I wrote about Woking's deathly charms once in the Financial Times. What more can I say?