From 1986 to 1991 Woodward worked as an advertising copywriter at Mavity Gilmore Jaume, Still Price Court Twivy D'Souza and Collett Dickenson Pearce.
He has also written columns for the Independent on Sunday,[4] Perspectives on Architecture,[5] Tatler[6] and Country Life[7] Woodward had a near-death escape in 1996 when he crashed his microlight aircraft into electricity cables near Lockerbie during the 1996 Round Britain Rally[8] – an event recounted in Propellerhead.
Propellerhead is a bildungsroman[9] cataloguing Woodward's serial misadventures as he attempts to achieve pilot status to facilitate his stated aim of seducing women – one woman in particular, known throughout the book as 'Lift Girl'.
[10] 'It is arranged in calendar format, a day to a page, and combines... tales of monster snowfalls... with first-hand accounts and weather-themed quotes from writers and poets.
[13] The narrative touches on various linked themes: the true impulses behind the desire to garden; the meaning of place; the joys of winter; the human search for paradise – in particular the 'garden in our heads'[14] that we all supposedly carry around and which hypnotists like to access to make their subjects relax.
[19] Propellerhead has remained continuously in print since publication and on its tenth anniversary, in 2011, was described by Pilot magazine as 'one of the best books ever written about flying'.
Woodward has cited the influence of Derek Jarman's garden in Dungeness, for its simplicity, sense of place and limited range of local, often wild, plants, herbs and flowers.
Our "garden" would consist merely of the existing idioms of the hill: the spring, walls, gates, wildflower meadows, stone piles, rusting farm implements.
'[29] The garden's few 'features' are site-specific, hill-top ones: an 'infinity vegetable patch'; clipped box balls 'rolling' down through a wild flower meadow; part of the Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas's 'The Lofty Sky' painted onto the wall of a barn facing a take-off point for hang gliders and paragliders.
The event was significant because it was the same rally in which Woodward had crashed so disastrously 15 years earlier[33] and also because it marked the centenary of the original Daily Mail Circuit of Britain Air Race in 1911.