Destroying Surrey - Martian Style

Whenever I travel through the affluent towns of Surrey, where Jenny has family, it amuses me to imagine these well-heeled places being demolished by Martian war machines in HG Wells's War of the Worlds. Of course, the films, being US made, transfer the action to American soil, but the original location of this very British apocalypse is in the commuter belt south-west of London.

Scarier looking than massive tax avoidance, but possibly less likely to bring the country to its knees.

There was already another Google Map set up showing the locations of the book, but it includes the locations north of London through which the narrator's brother escapes to the sea, which dissipates the focus and ends up looking a bit cluttered. So here is a more specifically Surrey version. You will have to enlarge it for all the pins to show up, it seems. Here you can see the locations of the early cylinder landings and the important stations of the nameless narrator's flight from the marauding tripods.

The Thames-side village of Shepperton, of course, has some later SF resonances as the long-time home of that other apocalyptically inclined Briton, J. G. Ballard.

View War of the Worlds in a larger map