Slough

[A long post with no pictures! Can you face it?! I wanted to get this out on Friday, but find my time constrained... I'll jazz it up soon... Maybe...]

Just before Christmas a poster called Phil Chamberlain posted a message on this site saying:

“I enjoy this blog a lot. However, it’s really about the upper middle classes – or rather, a particularly liberal section of it – rather than the “middle” middle class itself, which is busy reading the Daily Mail and living in places like Bromley, and not worrying itself in the slightest bit about ethical sourcing, yoga or anything similar.”

It struck a chord, even if I’m as confused as everyone else about the difference between upper, middle and middle class. Where do the boundaries lie? If, for instance, our ruler David Cameron is, as he likes to claim, upper middle class rather than just a toff I’m clearly not writing about the upper middle classes. But I suppose it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Dave might be trying to fool us. Meanwhile, I guess the main point Phil Chamberlain made stands however you choose to slice up our absurdly complicated class system. This blog has been pretty narrow in scope so far. As Phil rightly says I’m basically writing about liberal inner city Guardianistas for whom food is more of a competitive sport than a means of sustenance, for whom the suburbs are as alien and frightening as the Gobi desert and who definitely don’t clean the car on a Sunday.

So what of this other middle England? Just as I was wondering what I should write about it, some PR company put out a survey claiming to have found the heart of middle Britain. Yes, this was a transparent attempt to get publicity – and yes, I’ve been suckered right in (twice!), but the results still seemed fairly interesting to me.

These are the top ten towns in Middle Britain that they identified:

1     Slough
2     Rushmoor
3     Bexley
4     Spelthorne
5     Harrow
6     Bracknell Forest
7     Broxbourne
8     Hillingdon
9     Dartford
10     Milton Keynes

That list might as well have come from a book I once co-edited called Crap Towns. These are not places like Crouch End and Lewes. They are distinguished by roundabouts and appalling architecture rather than their over-priced delis, and three-wheeler buggies. Indeed, plenty of them did feature in Crap Towns. Slough, the number one town, featured especially heavily for obvious Betjeman-related reasons – and because of a hilarious campaign by residents of nearby Windsor to get their own postcode so that they didn’t have their addresses tarnished by the “SL” brand.

Crap Towns was written in what now seem like the halcyon days of New Labour. Back when it seemed terribly unfair that some places should be so much worse than others since there was so much money sloshing around the UK. I doubt that it would be half as funny to try to do a book like that nowadays. There would certainly be less point as there’s no hope that anywhere is going to get better anytime soon. That said, I did get a familiar twinge of excitement when I re-googled Slough and pretty much the first thing that came up was this hilarious website. Any town that needs to set up a website called Proud to be Slough clearly has image problems. Particularly if the pull quote on that site reads: “Slough has an energy which rivals the heart of London.” John Ryan , Sales Manager, Formula 1 Karting.

Google also taught me that:

1) Slough has the highest proportion of religious adherents in England. This strikes me as further bad news. It’s not so much the boring pious neighbour aspect of that figure that troubles me, but the desperation it suggests. Life in the real world, when the real world is Slough seems to have driven a lot of people into yearning for less distressing imaginary alternatives.

2) According to research by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) in 2006, Slough is England’s least tranquil area.

3) Astonishingly, the local council are trying to make Slough even more ugly. Here’s a quote from Twentieth Century Society:

“[A] tragically high quantity of good buildings have been demolished in Slough in recent years, including grand Art-Deco-styled factories by the likes of Wallis Gilbert and high-quality post-war offices. More are to come down as the town tries to erase its past and reinvent itself from scratch. Despite famously heckling Slough, John Betjeman’s praise for the Town Hall’s architecture as ‘a striving for unity out of chaos’ in 1948 has never been so relevant as today. C20 believes that the redevelopment of the Town Hall would be an act of vandalism to the civic centre and is supporting the Campaign to Save Slough’s Heritage in their request for a review of the decision.”

Of course, making the worst of a bad job has been a speciality ever since Betjeman wrote his famous poem inviting ‘friendly bombs’ to land on this “hell” in the 1930s. And yet, during all that time, Slough has also been getting steadily richer and steadily bigger. Something about the place clearly works. Some people clearly like it.

When I was working on the Slough bit of Crap Towns, I actually got quite a bit of positive feedback from people in the town, alongside the dozens of emails slagging it off. One of those correspondents even invited my co-editor and I to look around in the summer of 2003. We took her up on the offer while on an aborted attempt to write a kind of travelogue about Crap Towns in general (working title “To Hull And Back”).

Our tour guide clearly did like Slough. She actually had a very well paid job in the city and was there by choice, since it was a good place to escape the “madness” of the capital, but there wasn’t much she could show us that we liked. Quite a lot of the time was spent with her admitting that things were actually quite ugly, and us trying not to agree too strongly as that would seem incredibly rude. Quite a bit more of the time was spent in awkward silence. After all, what do you talk about with someone with whom your only link is a difference opinion about the town where they filmed the original series of The Office? Especially when you’re crammed into her little car and all too conscious of how badly your feet smell after several days on the road, tramping around the armpits of Britain.

We spent a long time in the car, driving around fairly aimlessly, as I remember. In my notebook I scribbled the following: “buildings sheer edges of cube-shaped office blocks and the bulbous plastic roofs of shopping malls on roads suspended above ground-level on concrete flyovers, curving between the squat buildings like a puny version of Fritz Lang’s vision of the high-rise buildings and layers of sky-highways in Metropolis.”

I wish I knew what that meant. I’m sure at the time it struck me as incredibly grand. I was basically trying to say that it was a bit ugly. The other thing I noted was how grey it was:
The buildings were grey, the bridges were grey, and the roads were grey. If you sliced open the office blocks they would no doubt reveal hundreds of grey men and women wearing grey suits sitting at grey desks.

I also made notes about “the garish reds and yellows of the shop signs and advertising hoardings.” So there must have been some colour. It was just all-artificial.

Eventually, I insisted that we get out of the car. Our guide didn’t like that, saying that people only generally walked in Slough if they were inside a shopping mall – if they had any sense. I realised why pretty quickly. Slough is one of those towns whose designers were convinced that people like nothing better than strolling through dimly lit concrete tunnels. It was a hot day and the sun was cooking up all kinds of bad smells. Piss, predominantly. But also tarmac, petrol and sugar. There was a big Mars Bar factory in Slough in those days and it added just the tinge of nausea to the air to make wondering around in the open(ish) air thoroughly unpleasant.

By this stage, our guide seemed to have defected. When we emerged from the tunnels, she said simply that we “hadn’t seen anything yet” and whizzed us back in the car to an estate of  pebble-dashed houses with boarded up windows clustered around a 16 storey brutalist tower block named, with a characteristic lack awareness, after the romantic poet Byron.

Just down the road from this poor housing were the gigantic hi-tech sheds of the Slough’s rich industrial estates. The money-making ability of these concerns was clear to see from the huge fleets of flash saloon cars gathered in the car parks outside, and the low level electric hum of constant activity and visible bustle within the plate glass windows.

They clearly weren’t splashing the cash on architecture though. The buildings were pretty much porta-cabins – just like the ones in the Ricky Gervais series. They were not, as the best buildings are supposed to be, designed for eternity. Not even tomorrow. They were just stopping places for constantly relocating, upgrading or downsizing companies who had no care for the local environment whatsoever. Betjamen would have written another, even nastier, poem if he had seen them.

I know this is hardly groundbreaking material. Slough is ugly. Everyone knows that. Our guide wasn’t expecting us to like it either. I eventually began to understand that the point she was trying to make was that she liked the place in spite of appearances.  Slough was, she explained, a place where she could feel comfortable, and not just because of inertia and the presence of her family and friends. It was easy to slip into the spirit of the town’s unrelenting blandness, to feel unique and yet at the same time have the sense that nobody expected anything of you. It was an argument I was to hear again and again over the next few months when doing the publicity run for the first book of Crap Towns. There was, as a man in a Slough’s branch of Ottakar’s bookshop explained to me, “a total lack of pretension” in the town and its people.

To illustrate her point, our guide took us out to one of the town’s large parks. It was bland too: flat and scrubby, grass yellowing in the sun and with a half drained concrete duck pond as its centrepiece. But it was also far easier than any of the big London parks. No one was on display here. No flash clothes. No ostentatious displays of Capoeira or martial arts. No hipster picnic parties from scrupulously retro hampers. Just people hanging out and sleeping under trees. I could see that it would provide real relief after a day spent in a high-pressure city job, as Cat had been trying to point out right from when we first met her. Slough, I concluded, is a town where it’s okay to be boring. In fact, it’s positively encouraged. And perhaps that’s what Middle Britain is about. A comforting blend of conformity and anonymity.

Perhaps…

Except there’s a big part of the story that I’m skipping over. I’d revise my conclusions about Slough now. Most people probably don’t like the fact that it’s dull any more than I did. They are there because it provides a good living. Slough’s always been a bit of a moneymaking machine.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the way it looks and feels, Slough isn’t a new town. It even gets a mention in the Domesday book and was a popular coaching stop for people heading west from London for several centuries, but it was only when a railway station was built there in the mid 19th century that the Slough we know and loath really came into being. It became a brick factory. For decades Slough provided a healthy percentage of the bricks that helped to build the Victorian Empire. And as the Empire receded in the 1920s the town developed the country’s first Industrial Estate, with generous tax allowances and relaxed planning laws for industrial concerns that wanted to set up there. When Betjeman wrote his poem huge developments of semi-detached “labour saving” homes had been built to house the workers from the local factories (like the huge Mars complex, which gives the air in the town that uniquely sickly flavour) which were thriving despite the world wide depression. Betjaman hadn’t seen half of it either, because the town almost doubled in size again in the 1950s and 1960s when huge tower block estates to house the thousands bombed out of their homes in London in the Second World War. Since the 1960s, it’s continued to grow fast specialising in ultra-hi-tech progressive industries: a triumph of hardheaded commercialism. According to wikipedia, recent new offices in the town include “those of Nintendo, Black and Decker, Amazon.co.uk and Abbey Business Centres.[27]” It’s also noted that: “Ferrari, Mercedes, Fiat and Maserati now have offices in the town.”

What does all this say about Middle England? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s less of a lifestyle choice than an economic imperative to live somewhere like Slough, so it’s wrong to talk about it in the same way. Maybe the conclusion is that Middle England doesn’t give a stuff about many of the things the so-called middle classes care for…

Or maybe I’ll just have to go to a few more places before I draw any conclusions.