The assumption had been that, like most dormitory suburbs born in the railway age, Woking had no history — the assumption outside Woking, anyway. Locals knew better, and in 1993 77 of them got together to prove it.

There was the Brookwood Cemetery, created by the London Necropolis Company in the 1850s as the largest in Europe, which had its own railway served by Waterloo station and its own platform there.

There was Brookwood Hospital, the mental hospital closed to become luxury flats whose in-house museum, containing everything from 19th-century lockable shoes for women internees to the apparatus for performing lobotomies in the 1950s, was given to the people of Woking with no suggestion as to where the collection might be seen.

And there was the first mosque in Britain, created by a linguistics professor in the 1880s.

“It was the only town in Surrey without a museum, and we couldn’t see why,” said Marilynn Scott, a local resident, trustee of that early group and now director of the Lightbox.

The Lightbox is the town’s museum and gallery which resulted from the local campaign. It opened in September and now has won not only the £100,000 Art Fund Museums and Galleries Prize — beating the Shetland Museum, the Wellcome Collection and the Commonwealth and Empire Museum in Bristol — but also an RIBA award for its architects, Marks Barfield.

It was a 15-year odyssey, however, to get the museum open, a journey which started when Gill Washington, a silversmith, teacher and chairman of Woking’s Arts and Crafts society, found common cause with the local history group. She wanted somewhere other than the occasionally available church hall to show the work of local craftspeople and artists. They sought a disused building, which for about £1 million could be converted.

But the campaign coincided with a property boom time, with companies relocating out of London, so that available buildings were all snapped up.

The museum would need to be purpose-built, and Woking Borough Council gave the new trust a small parcel of land, between the A320 and the sylvan Basingstoke Canal.

But none of the trust members had museum experience, except for Scott, then a lecturer on Greenwich University’s heritage and museums course, and a fundraiser.

“The collection was already there, in people’s attics, garages and under their beds, but with nowhere to show it,” she said.

She restarted the stalled campaign and persuaded the enthusiastic local authority to give £500,000 to develop a business plan; and she got advice

on finding an architect from Peter Wilson, the project director who

had been involved in the creation of the Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives and Tate Modern. “His advice is to start thinking big and continue that way,” she recalled, “so we had an international competition.”

The winners were Marks Barfield whose ambitious first proposal was soon changed to a simpler steel frame, clad by wood and steel — benches, the courtyard gates even some of the courtyard flowers have been commissioned from local makers.

“The secret of good fundraising,” Scott said, “is research, and if the research didn’t throw up offers of money, other, sometimes more valuable, things came.”

One was the Ingram Collection, 400 pieces of British modern art by the likes of Eduardo Paolozzi, Elisabeth Frink and Henry Moore, put together by the media millionaire Chris Ingram, a Woking boy and owner of Woking Town Football Club. His collection had been in store but is now on long-term loan to the museum.

At first the Heritage Lottery Fund had been unenthusiastic about funding a new museum, but when Woking Borough Council pledged £3 million towards the £7 million building costs, the fund promised £1.6 million, with the rest coming from trusts such as Garfield Western, Esmée Fairbairn and Wellcome, but also from local individuals and companies.

Scott had hoped that the Lightbox would draw 50,000 visitors in its first year: by May it had already had 70,000, and will have recorded well over 100,000 by its first birthday in September.

Now, with the museum open and acclaimed, Scott’s job is predominantly fundraising again. The Art Fund prize money will pay for a new outside gallery to help to meet the growing demand for temporary exhibition space, but the need to meet a £1 million turnover is never satisfied. She negotiated a service deal with Woking Council for an index-linked annual grant of £300,000 for 15 years — “an absolutely vital cushion,” she says, “but the reality of modern museums is that fundraising is perpetual.”

www.thelightbox.org.uk