Had I moved to Horsham in the belief that I would sample the good life, or at least the country life, I would be asking for a refund.

I had occasion to visit Horsham, in Sussex, the other day, and although it is considerably further away from London than the village in which I live, the traffic levels were intolerable. Actually, they weren’t. It was just that we were all bunched together by a succession of traffic lights apparently programmed to turn red if anyone should presume to pass. Stop….50 yards….stop….50 yards….stop….50 yards….stop. Our progress was merely a succession of punctuation marks.

I began to realise just how unaccustomed I have become to such impediments. In our village there are no traffic lights, no yellow lines, no parking meters, no traffic wardens, no zebra crossings, no this, no that. Yet we are fewer than 10 minutes from the M25.

I should be interested to learn how close you can get to London yet still live in a place that no traffic lights, no yellow lines, no parking meters etc., etc. As the crow flies, our village is about 21 miles from Charing Cross. Can you better that?

A friend of mine, who lives in Walton-on-Thames, in Surrey, has been complaining for years about the Pol Pot parking regime, which set me thinking. A little research turned up the fact that traffic wardens began patrolling Walton as long ago as 1966, and in Guildford, 1963.

One research trail led to another, and I discovered that during the 1930s, Reigate Borough Constabulary instigated an aerial patrol – an early version of India Nine-Nine – which worked in conjunction with a high-speed road-patrol group using Alfa Romeos and under the command of Sir Malcolm Campbell, no less, who was at the time an inspector in the Special Constabulary.

Digging further into the Surrey archives, I discovered that the first prosecutions for speeding in the county took place just five years after the last turnpike trust was wound up. In 1900, Surrey’s Chief Constable, one Captain Sant, issued “…a caution to the drivers of motor cars in respect of furious driving”, and warned that he would resort to “stringent measures”. In those days, few cars were capable of exceeding 10 mph.

His ‘stringent measures’ earned Sant a reputation, even among magistrates, for being too heavy handed with motorists. In 1905, a Guildford magistrate stated from the bench that “…a crusade was being waged against the motorist.” In the same year, a number of police constables manning a ‘speed trap’ on the Cobham Mile were successfully prosecuted for perjury.

The Surrey Constabulary became the butt of national humour, with cartoons appearing in  Punch, for example, depicting ‘A day on the Ripley Road’ and similar themes appearing in the cartoon pages of The Graphic and The Sketch.

Undeterred, Sant continued his war on motorists for more than 30 years and although retiring in 1930, he apparently remains a government consultant.