These are thrilling times for the ever-expanding town of Woking. Surrey County Council is thinking of transferring its headquarters there. Woking has been singled out for congratulation by central government for its pathfinding strategy for coping with climate change. And a £400m racing car factory designed by Norman Foster and partners has landed a Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust/BSkyB award as building of the year.
Yet if I were Woking today, I would be feeling cheated. A further triumph which might have brought international rather than mearly national acclaim has been cruelly snatched from its grasp. Natural justice should have ensured that Steven Spielberg's multi-million pound box office smasheroo, War of the Worlds, was set in and roundabout Woking. And it isn't.
The text of the HG Wells novel on which the film is based could not be more specific. This is late 19th-century Surrey. Wells's narrator, like Wells himself, lives in a segment of Woking called Maybury. Wells's Martians arrive on Horsell Common, a sandy wooded expanse north-west of the town. "An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away ... The thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand ..."
It's easy now, walking across the common, past the sandpit to the crater-like dent that harbours a little lake, to imagine that first discovery just as Wells's narrator saw it. The dreadful events that follow take place in determinedly ordinary, comfortable, Surrey locations: Chertsey, Ottershaw, Chobham, Ripley, Ockham, Pyrford, Send.
But all of that in the Spielberg version is replaced by a bleak industrial 21st-century urban American landscape. Had Spielberg honoured Wells's intentions, thousands might have been flocking to north-west Surrey, giving the often maligned and traduced town of Woking a place on the tourist trail alongside Stratford, Edinburgh and Bath.
The terrifying scenes when Tom Cruise and his son and daughter fight their way on to a ferry across the Hudson, only to find not safety but even more terrible menace, could so easily have been filmed not on the Hudson but on the Thames at Chertsey, or more faithfully still on the waterway that flows so conveniently close to Horsell - the Basingstoke canal.
But Woking, I'm sorry to say, seems to have accepted this slight without even the mildest mutter of protest. Admittedly it was mid-afternoon when I saw the film at the town's Ambassadors cinema: an evening audience might perhaps have been a touch more truculent. Yet as the story unfolded - as it transpired that the role which might have been played by Horsell bridge, and the church of All Saints at Ockham, and the picturesque ruins of Newark Priory, had here been usurped by soulless motorways, domineering flyovers, brutal and ominous factories - there was no perceptible sign of outrage.
How I longed for one of those peppery colonels who used to populate places like these in John Betjeman's day to rise in his place and bawl: "I protest! This is an outrage! A travesty!" - provoking at least a delegation demanding to see the manager.
Yet maybe Woking in the days of peppery colonels was already reconciled to such relegation. Even the George Pal version of The War of the Worlds, made in the 1950s, relocated the action to California. Or maybe it's more that Woking is putting its trust in three other versions of War of the Worlds now launched, relaunched, or otherwise threatened this summer - the Jeff Wayne musical adaptation of the mid 70s, which gave Horsell Common its rightful place in the story; a version from a production company called Asylum, already apparently out on DVD; and another due from Pendragon that not only keeps faith with Surrey but pointedly calls itself HG Wells's War of the Worlds.
But will any of these have matched the reported squillions that Spielberg spent on special effects? Is any destined to become a Spielberg-scale box office smasheroo? Will Woking, at the end of the day, come out on top of the pile? Sadly, I doubt it.
