I’ve been helping run photowalks around London for the past seven years, many of them in partnership with Rob from London Camera Project. Photowalks are a fantastic opportunity to meet other film photographers and visit places you otherwise might not head to.
Occasionally, we’ve held walks further afield too.
Among the gang of enthusiastic film photographers I’ve met over the past decade or so is Stephen Thrift, known to many as “Thrifty”. He lives in Woking, a town in Surrey about 20 or so miles south-west of central London. He fancied teaming up and holding a walk a little closer to his home.
If you’ve heard of Woking, it’s probably for one of two reasons; either was the birthplace of British rock band The Jam, or as the setting of one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time: H G Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’.
Woking was a leafy, well-to-do Home Counties town when Wells moved here in 1895. He used the town as the setting for his apocalyptic tale of invasion by an unearthly host of tentacled Martians, commanding massive tripod fighting machines that swept away human resistance with heat rays and salvoes of poison gas, before running foul of microscopic bacteria.
Thrifty’s idea got me thinking. Despite being a massive fan of Wells’ novel I’d never actually made the pilgrimage to the book’s setting. It tuned out that Wells’ birthday was on 21 September, so marking it with a photowalk was the perfect excuse. We started planning one for September 2025.
‘The War of the Worlds’ starts with astronomers seeing strange gas explosions on Mars; the explosions are the launch of the cylinders that bring the brutal Martian visitors to Earth. The first of these lands in the sandpits of Horsell Common, just on the edge of Woking.
Wells’ tale of interplanetary warfare was all the more shocking because it was set amongst the certainties of everyday England, with its Sunday services and reliable railway timetables. The quiet towns and suburbs the Martians lay waste to are real places: Shepperton, Weybridge, Leatherhead, all of them only a short trip away from London on the train.
The photowalk was already taking shape when I had an idea: Harman Technology, the makers of Ilford and Kentmere films, had followed up their first colour film (Harman Phoenix 200) with a redscale film. This film, known simply as Red, renders much of the frame in shades of red, orange and yellow. The Martians in Wells’ book bring along invasive plantlife called the Red Weed, which covers the Home Counties streets and fields in blood red vegetation.
A quick email to the excellent folk at Harman Technology’s marketing team, and they agreed to sponsor the walk with a roll of Harman Red for every attendee – allowing everyone to render quiet Woking in otherworldly Martian red.
On the day of the walk – where some of us met at the local Wetherspoons pub called The Herbert Wells, natch – the weather was pretty overcast, but the good thing about redscale films is that its red effect works well whatever the weather.
We tramped off through Woking, heading through the streets and woods until we made it to Horsell Common, the scene of Wells’ Martian bridgehead. I popped my roll of Harman Red into a Canon Sure Shot Sleek which had been a gift from Thrifty; the Sleek is a cracking little compact that takes super-sharp images. (If you see one, snap it up.)
Here’s a selection of images taken on this Wellsian tribute:
Central Woking has a large, looming tribute of its own to its famous son, near a state of Wells holding the world in his grasp.
In 1998, a 23ft-tall sculpture of a Martian tripod, designed by the artist Michael Condron, was unveiled to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the book’s publication. It’s an incongruous site amid the bricks, glass and steel of modern Woking.
Many thanks to Harman Technology for providing the film.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
