Lockdown has made us all more familiar with our local surroundings. While the imposition of travel restrictions has had near terminal impact on oldgreytravel’s wandering, it has opened up the opportunity to revisit old journeys, many even more fascinating in retrospect than at the time, and also to consider possibilities nearer to home.
Oldgreytravel has taken the opportunity to explore more of his adopted hometown and surrounding area. Daily walks and cycle rides in the Surrey Hills have opened up new routes and vistas previously unexplored. At the same time, the relative emptiness of streets has allowed a calm introspection of Guildford’s rich history and architecture – surely one of the most interesting towns around London.
Many people’s perception of Guildford is prejudiced by the road-side experience of the A3 bypass and the Guildford Gyratory north-south corridor. Fortunately, there is more to Guildford than that viewed from a passing car. The town centre, one of the most vibrant shopping centres in the South East, is a gem of narrow lanes spinning off the famous cobbled High Street. The Norman castle hints at early origins, the earliest standing structure being the Saxon tower to nearby St Mary’s Church. The town is a treasure chest of early medieval buildings with a later smattering of Georgian build and then a resurgence of Victorian engineering and development as the railway brought unprecedented growth to the area.
Hills are what define Guildford – the steep, whale-back curve of the High Street with the green swathe of The Mount terminating the view west, the indomitable bulk of the Cathedral floodlit on Stag Hill dominating the town and surrounding countryside, the precipitous hills directly south of the town centre leading within minutes to open Downs and limitless walking opportunities – west to Winchester, east to Canterbury and Dover and south to Brighton and the coast. It was these hills, or rather more precisely the gap in them forged by the River Wey, that was the genesis of the first settlement at the “golden ford” across the river. It was these hills that brought the Olympic road cyclists to Surrey and still provide a testing challenge to the myriad of cyclists who descend on the area every weekend. Even oldgreytravel has dusted off his trusty Marin mountain bike and joined the off roaders.
Therefore, oldgreytravel has decided to widen, or perhaps more accurately narrow, the scope of this blog to include some of the main attractions of Guildford and its surrounding area, some well known, others not. Historic buildings, local characters, leisurely walks and more exacting cycle rides are all likely to feature in a series of posts that will hopefully help to inform and entertain those who live in the area and perhaps encourage others to visit and enjoy one of the most over-looked towns in the South East of England.
