I live in a village called Hook, located in the north western corner of Hampshire, eight miles east of Basingstoke and eight miles west of Farnborough.
Today the village is a growing small town of modern sprawl. A mainline station makes Hook an ideal location for commuters and is the secret of the village's success, there is an old village centre that has less than a dozen original buildings which was the same size of the Hamlet a hundred and fifty years ago.
So why build a train station in a backwater?
The answer is entertainment and in particular horse racing. Just one hundred metres south of platform two is the nearest stretch of an 18th century racecourse that operated for 125 years between 1774 and 1900.
Below is a rough approximation of the location of the racecourse
View Odiham Racecourse in a larger map
The nearby pub at North Warnborough called the "Lord Derby" is all that remains of the horse racing days, with the site briefly being used as a golf course in the early 20th Century, later the area was transformed beyond all recognition by the building of the M3 motorway. Without the races the trains would never have stopped here, and without the station the village wouldn't have grown, all thanks to a forgotten racecourse.
View Odiham Racecourse in a larger map
The nearby pub at North Warnborough called the "Lord Derby" is all that remains of the horse racing days, with the site briefly being used as a golf course in the early 20th Century, later the area was transformed beyond all recognition by the building of the M3 motorway. Without the races the trains would never have stopped here, and without the station the village wouldn't have grown, all thanks to a forgotten racecourse.
