[2] His early childhood was spent in Cheam, Surrey, and his later schooling in Wood Green, north London, where he also took evening classes in geology.
His study of the Tertiary and Pleistocene deposits of the North Downs and Chiltern Hills of southern England led to an interest in geomorphology.
[4] During World War II this arrangement was disrupted by the evacuation of King's to Bristol, requiring Wooldridge to teach human geography.
Inspired by the theories of W.M.Davis on cycles of landscape evolution, Wooldridge employed detailed fieldwork to identify features such as river terraces and erosion surfaces, for example a presumed platform at 200 feet above modern sea level.
It explained both the concordant drainage[5] pattern of the central Weald (through long-term sub-aerial erosion), and the widespread discordant[6] features (as being related to a high-level marine shelf).
Wooldridge was a keen golfer and cricketer, a Congregationalist lay preacher (converting later to the Church of England) and an amateur operetta enthusiast.
Fundamentally, the 'Wooldridge and Linton Model' was based on the view that the south-east region had been tectonically stable except for two brief periods, in the Upper Cretaceous and the mid-Tertiary.