What can I say about Hinchley Wood? Safe, quaint, tame, beautiful suburban promised land to those tired of slumming it out in some inner city sh*thole and dreaming of a new life in the ‘country” (I cringe whenever someone associates where I live with the country). To the people actually living here under the age of 65, the word boring doesn’t even begin to cut it. Allow me to elaborate.
Hinchley Wood may be on the border of SW London and North Surrey but it has the latter’s spirit through and through. In this context that means that if you are young, somewhat edgy and not painfully generic, you leave as soon as you can. Walking on the common, it’s clear that the town committee have declared war on the very essence of youth in itself, the off licence proudly has a small sign saying “only 1 kid at a time NO EXCEPTIONS”. They even stopped McDonalds from opening a branch in the place, no quarter pounders for us, it might attract the ****** lovely travelling folk over near Chessington. The local wine bar (not pub, yes its Surrey) is a haunt for all the faux yuppies and middle class posh birds, trying too hard not to be off-putting.
To be honest, the place is somewhat polarising for animal lovers, theres a vet place not 50 metres away from a butchers, again adding to the suburban, affluent but non enigmatic feel. One highlight is walking up a somewhat steep hill into the trees, to see, yes the A3 road, how exhilarating!
The former pub was smashed to the ground to make way for, you guessed it, an Old peoples home! ******* fantastic. When i wanna go for a drink i have to walk over to Thames Ditton, a place with actual normal drinking establishments. Well, it’s not all that bad, there is an insanely large costa which could spice up the place a little bit, you never know.
The only real trouble are the local gangs of 12 year olds, who think they’re hard because they’ve brought Fanta for themselves for the first time and the occasional 15 year old who thinks he’s a bit of a nutter trying to climb up a tree, but looking like a **** instead.
To wrap things up, come to HW if you want a nice, lethargic suburbs experience, it might be a **** town for some people, but for myself, despite all of the aforementioned points, it’s still a good home to me.
