Woking is a commuter town in Surrey, south-east England, which developed as a result of the opening of the London and Southampton Railway (from 1839 the London and South Western Railway or LSWR) in 1838. Britain's first purpose-built mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque, opened in Woking in 1889.[1] The town boasts Britain's first public crematorium, opened in 1885.[2] Also in 1885 an orphanage for children of LSWR workers was founded at Woking. On heathland close to Woking, Brookwood Cemetery (at 2,000 acres the largest cemetery in Britain) was opened in 1854 as the London Necropolis. It was served by rail from London (there was a Necropolis Station adjacent to the capital's Waterloo Station); one of the funeral railway stations in the cemetery has been converted into a Greek Orthodox church.[3][4] Horsell Common, on the northern outskirts of Woking, was the secne of the Martian landing in H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The War of the Worlds. The town has an animated statue of a tripod fighting machine, called "The Martian". The local newspaper, until its demise in the 1990s, was also called "The Martian" .
Well-known people from Woking
The population of Woking is 90,500 (2005)[5]