The Surrey Cultural Lives map pinpoints locations in the county rich in cultural heritage. It shares stories about those spaces and the lives of those who lived, worked, or were inspired by Surrey.
By Stranglers France Service - Stranglers France Service, CC BY-SA 3.0
The Stranglers were formed in 1974 when Guildford off-licence owner and home-brew kit manufacturer Jet Black, aka Brian Duffy, met biochemistry graduate Hugh Cornwell…
Artists Mary Seton Watts (née Fraser Tytler) (1849-1938) and George Frederic Watts (1817- 1904) lived their later married years together at 'Limnerslease'. This was their studio-home at Compton in the Surrey Hills, originally intended as a winter…
The village of Shere is the site of the cell of Christine Carpenter, an early fourteenth century recluse or anchoress. Anchoriticism was a religious movement requiring strict isolation and celibacy that flourished in the later Middle Ages.…
Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din (d. 1932) was the first Imam of the Shah Jahan Mosque, Woking, Surrey, who had this Mosque opened as a permanent place of worship for Muslims, under Muslim management, in August 1913.
Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din was born in 1870 in…
Jane White was a novelist and memoirist who lived in Godalming from 1967 to 1985. At the age of 27, she moved with her family to a red brick house called ‘Hillsborough’ in Busbridge Lane, with its leafy, wild garden. She had very recently given…
The journalist and novelist H.G. Wells (1866-1946) is best known for his science fiction novels featuring angels, Martians, time-travellers, animal hybrids and revolutionaries. Wells’s imagination was fantastical but always rooted in some form of…
The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro – author of eight highly acclaimed novels including the Booker-Prize winning The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005) – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he…
The poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) is most associated with the counties of Hampshire and Sussex: in her poetry especially, she offers loving descriptions of the South Downs and of Beachy Head, based on her own extensive walking in…
'The Battle of Dorking' (1871) was the first work of fiction by George Tomkyns Chesney (1830-1895), a ground-breaking text that inaugurated the popular genre of invasion-scare literature. Chesney had worked in the British Army from 1848 and spent…
Imagine that it’s a perfect Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1934 and you’ve decided to leave Guildford’s busy streets and stroll north towards the peaceful village of Shalford. You’ve just reached the first small houses when suddenly the…
'The Battle of Dorking' (1871) was the first work of fiction by George Tomkyns Chesney (1830-1895), a ground-breaking text that inaugurated the popular genre of invasion-scare literature. Chesney had worked in the British Army from 1848 and spent…
The journalist and novelist H.G. Wells (1866-1946) is best known for his science fiction novels featuring angels, Martians, time-travellers, animal hybrids and revolutionaries. Wells’s imagination was fantastical but always rooted in some form of…
The poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) is most associated with the counties of Hampshire and Sussex: in her poetry especially, she offers loving descriptions of the South Downs and of Beachy Head, based on her own extensive walking in…
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Surrey has been filled with inspiring stories of creativity, resistance, and community. Read the stories of those who have shaped Surrey’s cultural heritage.
