In this series I'm taking the train one stop beyond the Greater London boundary, getting off and seeing what's there. Today that means Hinchley Wood, one stop beyond Surbiton on the New Guildford line.
100 years ago these were unsung fields to the east of Esher, officially in the parish of Thames Ditton, sliced through by a non-stopping railway. What changed things was the arrival of the Kingston Bypass in 1927, a dual carriageway which suddenly opened up the potential for development. A speculator purchased land around the point where road and railway crossed, managed to persuade Southern Railway to build a station and commuter expansion was rapid. Today 5000 people live here, in generally very nice houses, and can if they choose be at Waterloo in half an hour flat. Admittedly there are only two interesting things in Hinchley Wood, one of which no longer serves a purpose and one of which has been demolished, but I'll give it my best shot.
You're right, this is the first time I've done a 'One Stop Beyond'. I thought it might be a good idea for a series because people love railways, even when it's really only cover for tedious reportage about minor provincial dormitory suburbs.
Hinchley Wood's not a lovely station, not by any definition, but it is an odd one. The island platform is only accessible via a footbridge, not from the main road, and the canopy's in a bit of a state. Passenger numbers are lower than the quietest of tube stations but the ticket office on the platform still opens for four hours and a half every weekday morning. And because they built the station where the tracks bifurcate, one of the platforms runs straight while the other veers off and curves into the distance. To get to London, take the bendy option.
I reckon there are about 30 stations One Stop Beyond the Greater London boundary, so this series could run and run.
Hinchley Wood started growing around the station so that's where the shops are. Ignore the doctor's surgery in prime position by the station car park because it's a private clinic, not NHS. Two short parades face off across the memorial gardens, the oldest business being Ashton Davis which has been repairing TV sets since 1960. Cavan Bakery (with its smart looking purple paper bags) claims to have been baking daily since 1929 but that's only true in Twickenham, this is a much later outpost. The eclectic mix also includes a Bangladeshi restaurant, a dry cleaners called Esher Valet, a fishing tackle shop and a bogstandard Costa. If you want Waitrose you have to go to the little shop at the Shell garage by the crossroads.
I could have branded my recent trip to Iver as a One Stop Beyond, ditto my recent trip to Denham. In good news that means I'm not going to be working through the full set because I've already missed two.
The most exciting thing that ever happened in Hinchley Wood is that Mikhail Gorbachev dropped into the local pub for steak and ice cream. This was in 1997 so he wasn't President of the Soviet Union any more, instead travelling home from a US lecture tour when he was stranded at Heathrow overnight following a bomb scare. He asked his chauffeur to recommend a traditional English pub and was driven to The Hinchley Wood in Hinchley Wood where his party ordered soup, lamb steaks and cherry sundaes. Mikhail had a pint of bitter and a pint of lager, his wife Raisa plumped for water and cognac and their four bodyguards finished off a bottle of whisky. The pub's manager was reportedly "gobsmacked." When McDonald's bought the pub two years later local residents grouped together and successfully fought them off, this after a 500-day sit-in, only to see the building demolished and replaced by an undistinguished stack of retirement flats. There are thus now no pubs in the village and this episode of international diplomacy can never be repeated.
If you write for a Surrey-based news portal this is exactly the kind of story you could string into a 500 word clickbait article, but please be aware I do not give you permission to nick my photos.
Another shopping parade stretches up Manor Road North, because Hinchley Wood may not be a large village but it has a decent amount of residual wealth. The wine shop is plainly catering to a need. The vet's is even bigger than the hair salon. The Budgens supermarket is actually a Kavanagh's, so a bit up itself. Crossy's is a souped-up ironmongers selling stepladders, bird food, coal and carving trays. The Residents' Association has done a really nice job with the hanging baskets and flower beds outside. All of Hinchley Wood's councillors are from the Residents' Association, voted through by a considerable margin, because that's the kind of place it is.
Despite this feature being railway-related I didn't arrive or depart by train, I caught the K3 bus from Kingston, because Hinchley Wood is beyond the Oyster boundary but inside the fortunate bit of Surrey with a regular red bus service.
The road and railway divide Hinchley Wood into four residential quarters, or five if you include the wedge where the railway line splits. The most significant chunk is to the northeast where we find Hinchley Wood's secondary school, Hinchley Wood's primary school and Hinchley Wood's church, which is St Christopher's. It was built late, in 1952, so looks pleasingly postwar with a tapering brick tower and a copper statue of St Christopher carrying the Christ child on his shoulder protruding out front. The first Sunday of the month looks to be the most exciting because the church hosts a family-friendly non-Eucharist in the morning and a hearing aid clinic in the afternoon.
The trouble with writing about commuter outposts is that a lot of the reportage will be a list of shops and a lot of the rest will be pointing out there are a lot of houses, so it could all get a bit samey.
The vast majority of Hinchley Wood's houses are detached, and even the ones that look too wide so must be semis turn out to be detached too. The finest have rustic gables, copious tiles and a porch resembling some kind of cathedral doorway. Out front often resembles a car showroom, and there might additionally be landscapers trimming the laurel hedge or tradesmen doing showy home improvements. Hardly anyone's retreated behind security gates so it also looks jolly friendly, but simultaneously jolly expensive - the local estate agent had nothing in its window below £975,000. The cheapest houses are between the railway lines on the former Inland Revenue site, but I see the ward boundary excludes those because their sole access road exits into Thames Ditton.
I walked round Hinchley Wood for two hours researching this, and I'm still a bit cross I never managed to shoehorn the archaic railwayfootbridges into the narrative, nor the Scilly Isles roundabout, nor the fact it was bin day.
The thing about the Kingston Bypass is that it was itself bypassed in 1976 when the Esher Bypass was opened, hence the road that tears through Hinchley Wood is no longer the A3 but the A309. On the western side the houses come to an abrupt stop along the line of the local river, The Rythe, which rises on Esher Common and flows independently to enter the Thames at Thames Ditton. A handful of ugly footbridges lead across onto Littleworth Common, the largest greenspace hereabouts, where even the best trodden paths felt like a secret safari on a Wednesday afternoon. The river doesn't yet have a serious Himalayan balsam problem but the pink and white invasion is underway with a significant foothold at the foot of Oaken Lane.
If you're still reading you may be wondering where the second interesting thing in Hinchley Wood is, and I'm sorry but I kept it back for the final paragraph.
It's easy to see how the village got its name because if you look on a 100 year-old map the only named feature amid the fields was a small wood called Hinchley Wood. It's still there, covering the northern flank of a small but steep hill accessed from the top of Hillcrest Gardens, and a key part of the local dogwalking circuit. It's known as Telegraph Hill because one of the 13 towers in the London to Portsmouth semaphore tower chain was built at the summit, operational between 1822 and 1847 when the electric telegraph took over. Semaphore House is now a lofty white-painted residence but vanishes in the summer behind a screen of beech trees, so it's fortunate that last time I was here was in winter (researching semaphore towers in some depth) when it very much stood out. For now, alas, the only thing worth seeing in Hinchley Wood can't be seen.
I understand you're not particularly interested in Hinchley Wood, but I am raising the hopes of hundreds of readers who are all sitting there thinking something like "ooh I can't wait until you get to Cuffley".
