Tomorrow the world, but today… Woking

Friday January 4, Woking, England

If you are setting out to make three ambitious documentaries about art, architecture and faith, with HD filming in sixteen countries, where else to begin but Woking? At least that's where Nonie Creagh-Brown and I go a couple of days after New Year to Britain's first purpose-built mosque.

Surrounded by an indisutrial estate on the edge of Woking is the Shah Jahan Mosque which was built as part of Wilhelm Leitner's Oriental Institute in 1889. As the mosque's website explains, "The purpose of the Institute was to enable visiting dignitaries from India to stay and study in culturally sympathetic surroundings. It also enabled Europeans being posted to India to learn the language and culture." It's an entirely surprising and beautiful building in the strangest of surroundings, but importantly it remains today an active centre for Islamic worship and study.

The Shah Jahan Mosque is one of 27 buildings that we have chosen to feature in a series of three films about the art and architecture of the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We're setting out to explore the cultural riches of these traditions but also to attempt to understand aspects of these faiths in the world today. So we want to see the sacred buildings not only as architectural wonders but also as places of lived faith. At each site we hope to find a contributor to the films who can tell us about the history and art but also about what the church or mosque or synagogue means to them in their life.

Our recce on a dismal, rainy Friday afternoon goes well, and we agree to return early in March to film. We will not have the luxury of visiting in advance the locations where we're filming abroad, so in early January we use trips to Bristol, to Brick Lane and the City of London, and to Cheadle in Staffordshire to think through not only the specific possibilities (and challenges) of these places but also how we are going to approach shooting in general. (John Wyver)