WOKING, England -- With ''War of the Worlds" set to open in theaters Wednesday, those troublesome extraterrestrials are about to land again -- this time on the East Coast, in the highly anticipated Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise vehicle. Makes you wonder, though, why the celestial out-of-towners always seem to home in on the USA, at least on the big screen.
In the original 1898 story, a ripping yarn by 19th-century British sci-fi novelist H.G. Wells, they landed in Woking, this town in the south of England where the writer lived for 18 prolific months.
The most conspicuous sign of Woking's central role in the ''War of the Worlds" story is a stunning, sinister-looking monument in the town center. The 23-foot-high Martian Tripod was erected in 1998, on the centenary of the publication of the novel. (Wells's invaders, unlike those in the new movie, were Martians.) In front of this polished-steel installment, half-embedded in the walkway, is a cylindrical ''pod" resembling those in which the space invaders arrived. Most of the original ''War of the Worlds" action took place in and around Woking. A few yards away is the H.G. Wells conference center. This is War of the Worlds Ground Zero.
Woking, 25 miles southwest of London, is a gritty town, Victorian red brick and brutal 1970s concrete in equal measure, with more recent additions like a futuristic shopping mall and an enormous single slab of high-rise office block on the skyline. Spielberg could have done worse if he had decided to use the original location for his film.
Iain Wakeford, 42, a businessman and local historian, leads guided walks based on Wells's classic. The boyish, rather than bookish, researcher, speaking with the distinctive Thames-Estuary accent of the area, said, ''Woking spawned a world-beating science-fiction story that on publication was years ahead of its time. Seeing local landmarks that were, for example, destroyed by the Martians' death-ray, really brings this story to life. The 'War of the Worlds' is woven into this town's psyche just as much as any real-life developments. And Wells juxtaposing a doomsday scenario against quaint Middle England was typically masterful."
Woking today is vibrant, multicultural, and somewhat schizophrenic. It feels like a London neighborhood that has been transplanted somehow into Surrey, an affluent and leafy suburban county, which, despite its proximity to the capital, is the most heavily forested of any county in the United Kingdom. But what really sets it aside from neighboring towns is its dark, dramatic history.
In the early 19th century, Woking was an unremarkable and rather poor country village. In 1838, however, when the town became an important railway junction, it grew rapidly. Also in common with railway junction towns the world over, it attracted its fair share of oddballs and drifters.
Woking had long had a reputation as rather a rough and dangerous place, with slums and crime. Then, from 1854, the town began to take on an air of prosperity, thanks to daily deliveries of dead bodies. The rapidly industrializing London of this time was racked by cholera and typhoid epidemics, and by the 1840s was struggling to find enough places to bury its dead.
Woking Common was eyed as a suitably distant repository for the highly infectious corpses. Thus, the vast Brookwood Cemetery, close to Woking railway station and at the time the largest cemetery in Europe (2,000 acres), was conceived and opened by the London Necropolis Co.
A quarter-million souls have been laid to rest here, including large numbers of servicemen from the two World Wars. During its peak year, 1866, 3,842 people were buried in Brookwood's sandy soil.
The company had its own branch line, and for years, trains ran daily from London to Brookwood.
Military cemeteries, separately administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, were established in 1917 and extended substantially during and after World War II. And that war also scored a direct hit on the London Necropolis Co.: The funeral train service stopped running after the company's London terminus was destroyed by German bombers in 1941.
Brookwood is remarkable in many ways. Not only does it contain Britain's oldest Muslim cemetery, but also the World War I American cemetery, and a Zoroastrian burial ground. Not surprisingly, given its intriguing past, the cemetery has been designated a conservation area. It's an atmospheric place, Gothic and hauntingly beautiful, with groves of tall, dark conifers, shaded walks and glades, and intriguing monumental masonry.
It is not the only place that makes Woking unusual.
''From the late 1850s onwards," said Wakeford, ''the Necropolis Co. sold vast areas of land for various institutions, such as the Surrey County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, the Woking Invalid Convict Prison, and the crematorium -- the last two being the first of their kind in Britain."
During the Victorian Age, it was truly a place of the dead, mad, and bad, but then came a rather different development, one that laid the foundations of the multicultural Woking of today.
In 1889, the Shah Jehan Mosque was built to provide a place of worship for Muslim students at Woking's now-long-gone Oriental Institute. Its traditional Indo-Saracen design includes a dome, minarets, and courtyard. The interior is decorated with geometric Islamic patterns and Arabic calligraphy. Since the building of the mosque, Woking has been one of Britain's important Muslim centers, and today in one of the town's central wards, Muslim South Asians are more than 30 percent of the population.
Thus, Woking offers outstanding dining experiences for lovers of fiery cuisine, mostly Pakistani. A favorite place for curry aficionados is the Khyber Pass, hard by the railway station that has been so crucial to Woking's development.
Neveeda Mitchell, 40, a website designer and mother of two, visits Woking regularly from her home five miles away. A Pakistani-born Briton married to a dot-com entrepreneur from London, she enjoys the convenience of Woking's South Asian grocery stores.
''I come into town frequently to buy halal meat, chickpeas, spices, and the other authentic ingredients I need," she said. ''I try to maintain a bicultural home, especially at mealtimes. Mind you, my children are struggling a bit with Urdu, despite having had language tuition at a Woking community center."
Was she thrilled at the prospect of seeing the latest ''War of the Worlds" adaptation?
''I only very recently learned of the Woking connection," she said. ''The film's bound to be a big hit here. I guess that also means my 8-year-old son will be asking me for the computer game soon."
The first part of Woking to feature in Wells's story is Horsell Common. Close to the town center, the common is 750 acres of semi-wild parkland, much loved by local walkers, picnickers, and equestrians. The common also includes three Bronze Age burial grounds.
Recently, George Holifield, 47, a Woking resident and ex-serviceman (Falklands War), walked his black Labrador retriever in the common. He's a gentle giant of a man with blurry patriotic tattoos on his arms and robust views on his hometown.
''Woking's being strangled by traffic," Holifield said. ''I like to come to the common to get away from the concrete and cars. That said, Woking's always been close to my heart. Given the right kind of summer's day, along the canal or by the cricket green, it's marvelous. Good football team, too."
Holifield is a longstanding ''War of the Worlds" fan.
''My housemaster read the book to us at boarding school," he recalled. ''Absolutely terrifying, being so close to home. But brilliant. Lord knows what Hollywood's going to do to it. I recently tried to buy the book at Ottakar's [bookstore], but they'd sold out. Probably because of the buzz about the film."
Michael Edginton, 43, a surveyor, said, ''In my youth, Woking had a bad press. The town center was a no-go area after dark, and it was a bit too inner-city for a Surrey town. Today, the redeveloped center has a theater of national renown, and superb family shopping. Plus regular French markets in the Square, since the Eurostar opened between London and Paris, which give the place a Gallic flavor about once a month. I wonder what H.G. Wells would make of the place now."
If the massively popular Wells was Woking's late-19th-century pop-culture icon, another native son, Paul Weller, filled the same role in the late 20th century. It is difficult to overemphasize Weller's place in Britain's rock 'n' roll history. While fronting The Jam rock group, Weller provided Britain with some truly brilliant songs. ''Down in the Tube Station at Midnight," ''Strange Town," ''Eton Rifles," and, most chillingly suburban of all, ''A Town Called Malice" are quintessentially English pop songs, and the sounds of the suburbs. Above all, these are Woking songs, derived from Weller's childhood and youth here. From 1978 to 1982, The Jam was the biggest band in Britain. As a successful solo artist in the 1990s, Weller memorably name-checked Woking with the title of an album, the chart-topping ''Stanley Road," where he grew up and learned his first guitar chords.
The surrounding countryside, which is never far from this compact town of 90,000 inhabitants, is lushly beautiful, no more so than around its two waterways, which get a mention in Weller's 1981 song ''Tales From the Riverbank."
Regarded as one of the most beautiful waterways in Britain, the Basingstoke Canal, built between 1788 and 1794, traverses Woking Borough and a two-mile conservation-area stretch can be accessed from the town center. The River Wey provided Woking with a link to the River Thames, and London. It was one of the first rivers in the country to be made navigable; an act of Parliament in 1651 enabled the stretch from Weybridge to Guildford to become usable and the Wey Navigation Canal opened in 1653.
As Wakeford said, ''Woking's setting . . . makes it a handy center for exploring the local area -- a timeless landscape, unlike the town. In my lifetime, Woking's gone from being the place of The Jam's small-town angst to a budding city of ambitious and futuristic development in the 1990s, to the Woking of today -- a place that for the first time in its history is becoming a destination for visitors from afar, strictly terrestrial, in its own right."
Nick Walker is a freelance writer who lives near Woking. 
