Teegee Derive

In the UK, the county of Surrey has a special reputation. High streets paved with gold, land rovers stalking the tarmac hills, McMansions poking out of perfect little glades. 

    Surrey is everything that's wrong with England. At least, that was my expectation.

    I thought, I'll go to the old Top Gear test track, it'll mean going through Surrey, but that's fine, necessary evils. The site of many a Reasonably Priced Car journey and innumerable drag races (not the fun kind), the test track is found on the site of the former Dunsfold Aerodrome, located close to Surrey's southern border with Sussex, before the downs clear the way to the sea. So to get to Dunsfold, I had to track along the length of most of Surrey. A HuffPost style line would assert here that "what I found will shock you" - but what I found wasn't shocking, it was just a touch surprising.

    When I got off at Guildford, I found the town to be more varied than expected. Like many market towns, you walk out of the station building into a poorly planned liminal space that lies between town and country, complete with empty office blocks and confusing traffic islands. Then when you get to Guildford town centre, you find it to be incredibly... mixed. Yes, there's the old High Street, complete with Jack Wills, Cos and even, raises hand to mouth in ironic shock, Le Creuset. But behind it lies North Street, with all the haunts you'd expect of a normal town: Greggs, Poundland, a series of vapes. And then there's the Friary Centre, a horrible shopping parade, like Brent Cross in miniature but with none of the ambition. And this is what struck me most about Guildford: it's full of horrible neoliberal-era architecture, the sort of stuff Owen Hatherley pisses onto righteously from his highly-spoken horse. 

    I cut through the Friary Centre to catch my bus, sitting in the brown brick porches among the other public transport prone folk. And I realise they look completely different to the folk on the high street. Not that there isn't an economic divide between bus riders and car drivers; of course there is. But this was stark. It hits me: Surrey is one thing for its well-to-do, and another thing for everyone else. Realistically, every town is the same in this respect - but it's in Guildford that the issue is shafted into sharp contrast. If you drive your car round the back of High Street and then speed back to Godalming (or somewhere else equally inane) you need not once absorb the remainder of Surrey life. Every county has its inequalities, but those of Surrey are placed in sharper contrast by its sheer wealth (e.g. Virginia Water is the most expensive postcode district nationwide) and its geography (hills and river valleys divvying up settlements and street patterns, making the automobile a virtual necessity for most). 

    Right, so, bus, then. It's me and four old dears. They're here for the bus driver; they mutually understand one another's schedules. When the bus comes to my stop, now emptied of any elderly folks, the bus driver asks me whether I'm here with the tree huggers. People rarely get off in the middle of the plain just beyond Dunsfold and apparently a local copse is getting the chop. I say, no, I'm just here for a walk. I'm not sure what the driver would have done with the truth, or whether he would have shared the details of my peculiar obsession with the old dears.

    In any case, the bus pootles off deeper into Surrey and I start walking. A lot of the footpaths around here are also people's front gates, which makes them much less obvious; the owners are reluctant to yield their own rights of way, even though it's a legal, well, right. Some of the signs were particularly egregious:

    I step over a broken kissing gate, pass an old barn and then I'm met with something unexpected. It's just the old Top Gear Test Track. But it's right there. In full view. I thought there'd be a chain-link fence with a tiny gap. This is full frontal. I'm pretty sure I saw someone in a reasonably priced car! I'm also pretty sure I saw a helicopter flying overhead, which saw me. I'm also pretty sure that what I was doing, repeatedly filming in the vicinity of private property, was only semi-legal. But because I've used the words "pretty sure" and "semi-legal" and discussed the legalities of rights of way in the previous paragraph, I think I'm covered on this one. Lawyers, come at me! Do not actually come at me, that was a joke, legally a joke.

    Anywho, I film some video segments in front of the test track and then my camera dies. The remains of the day are pure walk as a result. But somehow, in Surrey, leafy home county next to London, more urbanised than any other non-metropolitan county, there is hardly any signal. What the geoff, guys! Get some by-laws about it. So, dear reader, I get lost, repeatedly. This means, however, that I stumble across some interesting things:

    On a particularly testing stretch of track, things get really muddy. I notice the horseshoe prints and consider that the main reason why this track has grown so muddy is the number of horses, rather than pedestrians, regularly using it. Contemptuous as I am of the well-to-do horse-riding community with their Bridgerton fetishism and awful taste in hats, I think, honest-to-god: horses should be banned.

    Then I think, honest-to-god: I spent barely half an hour in the vicinity of the Top Gear test track and Jeremy Clarkson's iconoclastic ire has rubbed off on me. But also, horses are just not very good.

    There's an overarching thing about these lands of Surrey. They all actually seem pretty empty, and it's not just the lack of signal. Most of the farms seem to be fallow, apart from the occasional plot landed with sheep, them fluffy white tenants. It just surprises me rather given, again, just how close we are to London, that most of Surrey sits doing not much at all. It's often noted that, as a percentage, Surrey is the most forested county in England. However, a good lot of this forest is private, just the same as is the agricultural land. Crucially, an "Area of Natural Beauty" need not be public; only preserved. And yet, there are tens of thousands of people the county over in Croydon, Sutton or Merton who struggle to access green spaces. I think: why not open up Surrey more? Why not turn over more of this land to national parks, or to real wilderness? Chuck in a few wolves for flavour. Deal with the horse problem from earlier. Let wildflowers, fungi, and all manners of animalia get involved. No really, why not? Well, the main barrier to entry here seems the artificial price placed on agricultural land. Right now, there's an incentive for landowners to let the earth do something low-intensity and, under normal circumstances, low-yield. Like bunk up some sheep. This doesn't stand up to scrutiny. While concreting Surrey over appeals to few people (least of all those who live in Surrey) repurposing oh, half of it for a new national park could surely have greater economic returns, for tourism and natural science, in the long run. 

    I spend the next two hours walking down an incredibly straight "rail trail": a former railway from Horsham to Guildford now out of commission and open to cyclists and ramblers (horses: not sure). But the thing is: it's powerfully dull! A useful commuter route for some (muddiness not withstanding) but by no means a recreational payload. This is why we need to wilderness Surrey over. It's not good for much else.

    As if to prove my point, re-entering Guildford shows up the city once again for what it really is. Posh folks going to mediocre pubs with London-like pint prices. Bloated men in poorly fitting name-brand-logo jeans staring into estate agents' windows with their sad wives. Infinite hen dos. 

    The thing is, there's loads of nice normal things about Surrey if you try and look at it holistically. But as a bastion of new money, its urban half is one of the most displeasing places on earth. And the rural half of it has only stayed rural because of a perverse incentive to keep old money there as well. But it's not all bad, I think as I depart: while Dunsfold has made me judgemental, and Guildford has made me cynical, there's no question that Surrey has made me think.