My Surrey Weekend by Chris Ingram
Above: Woking businessman Chris Ingram at The Lightbox
Published in Surrey Life magazine October 2008
Woking businessman Chris Ingram is the owner of Woking Football Club, has his art collection on display at The Lightbox and has business interests all around the world. Really, it’s amazing that he has a weekend at all. Here, he reveals what he gets up to... In some respects, my weekend lasts four days. I work in London from Tuesday to Thursday and at home on the other days. However, it’s not a weekend in the normal sense. I’m very lucky to be able to pick and choose what I do, so I can’t tell the difference between work and play sometimes. Essentially, my life is now a series of projects, both inside and outside Surrey.
My pattern seems to be ‘leisure in scenic Guildford: make things happen in Woking’. Every weekend will in some way involve Woking Football Club – apart from going to a match, I will either be catching up with the chairman, David Taylor, on some key issues or dealing with the unending saga of our planned redevelopment scheme.
Also, I like to keep in touch with our football in the community scheme, where we now run 12 projects aimed at helping children and disadvantaged groups in the Woking area.
Last autumn, I lent my modern British art collection to The Lightbox on a long-term basis. My brief to them was that, since I was building a national collection of art and sculpture, I didn’t want them acting only as a local gallery. Well, they’ve achieved that in spades, haven’t they! What with their architectural awards for the building and winning the national Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries, they could well claim they’re over-achieving.
I’m usually talking to Marilyn Scott and her team about plans for future shows; cataloguing and storage issues, and joint marketing opportunities. And, of course, sometimes I like to go over to The Lightbox and just have a look at the collection!
Many of my roads seem to lead to Woking these days and a new one resulted from my buying a stake in a young company, Azzurri, which is in the five-a-side football business. I like this sector, which involves people paying only a little bit of money every week to indulge their passion for football and going out with their mates. Azzurri will more than double its size this year and I’m betting it’s recession-proof.
The ‘weekend proper’ varies: if we go shopping we have a ritual whereby we will go into Guildford early and start with a latte at Caffe Nero while reading The Times.
We will usually go out for a meal at least once: sometimes L’Auberge in Clandon, Loch Fyne in Guildford or Kinghams in Shere, and if we are a family group, Blubeckers in Gomshall or Edwinns in Bramley are favourites.
We have five grandchildren and we are incredibly lucky that our daughter lives in the same village and our son lives in Weybridge, so we see a lot of them. Mind you, it’s not all good... I often find myself playing football with my six-year-old grandson, Eddie, and from being merely exhausting last year, it is now embarrassing as I battle to avoid a humiliating defeat!
Janet and I try to go out for a four to five mile walk at some time over the weekend. Other times, it might be a stroll in the RHS Gardens at Wisley, Winkworth Arboretum or Claremont.
If we are not going out in the evening and there is nothing on TV, I will select a DVD from my collection of Westerns, turn the lights right down and escape into an altogether simpler world!
My Surrey Weekend is a monthly guest column in Surrey Life magazine, where we discover how some of the county's high profile characters spend their weekend. To catch up with the series, click here.