Woking

Woking was destroyed by Martians, and has dined out on it since. H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds while living here in the 1890s and, with a satirist's affection, made his own commuter town the invasion's first target — the cylinder falls on Horsell Common, Woking is vaporised by heat-ray — and the town returned the compliment with a seven-metre chrome Martian tripod striding through the pedestrian centre, science fiction's most cheerful municipal monument. The common, unvaporised, remains excellent walking.

The town's real firsts are quieter and stranger: the Shah Jahan Mosque of 1889, Britain's first purpose-built mosque, an Indo-Saracenic jewel among the pines; and Brookwood Cemetery, opened in 1854 as the largest in the world, served from London by its own funeral trains — the Necropolis Railway, Victorian death administered with timetables. Modern Woking builds at the other end of speed: McLaren's Formula 1 team and supercars are engineered on the town's edge in their lakeside technology temple.

The stage is the New Victoria Theatre — the venue documented in the concert record — the large receiving house in the town centre whose touring musicals, opera, ballet and orchestral nights serve commuter Surrey. Martians, minarets, mourning trains and motorsport: Woking is suburbia with a remarkable filing cabinet.