Ugly and bankrupt, can moving it save Britain's ‘most miserable' town?

Telegraph

6 days ago

It is a drab English day and I am on my way to Slough to ask residents how they feel about potentially becoming part of London. And yes, this could become reality, say all of the relevant parties – even though the borders of London have not significantly changed since 1965, even if it does result in the map of Greater London sprouting an ungainly westerly horn. 'There is nothing immutable about today's version of London. If London and Slough wanted this to happen, it could happen,' says Tony Travers, expert in local government at the LSE.
The Labour Government is committed to a radical English devolution programme, creating a series of dynamic new unitary authorities in the hope of saving places like Slough from what Angela Rayner calls the 'doom loop' of low expectations. Slough Borough Council, declared bankrupt in 2021 with a £760 million black hole in its finances, 'is probably not going to exist much longer,' says Dexter Smith, the Conservative leader of the council. Too small to continue as a unitary authority of its own, a merger is likely. Slough could look west down the Thames Valley and combine with Reading, Windsor, Maidenhead and/or Bracknell; or it could look east, merging with the London Borough of Hillingdon, or perhaps becoming a London borough all of its own.
In May, in a letter to the local MP co-signed by 24 others, Mewa S Mann, the former mayor of Slough, wrote, 'For many of us, Slough is already intrinsically connected to London… it is a city we feel part of.' Could the familiar outline of our capital soon change?
'It's a realistic possibility,' says Smith. 'It's not what we're actively working on. But it could become a possibility.' It is the impending construction of the Heathrow third runway, which falls between Hillingdon and Slough, that has sharpened minds. 'We're moving into new territory now. The Government has said they want it to happen and they want it to happen fast.'
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is in principle up for the merger. 'I'm always happy to speak to those who want to join the people's republic of London,' he has said.
Other Londoners may take more persuading. 'It's bad enough to have it 'touching' London, never mind the prospect of it becoming an actual part of London,' wrote one Reddit user. But that's just Londoners being Londoners. Slough residents will have heard worse from Windsor and Eton. And seen from another angle – say, from my shiny new Elizabeth Line train as it glides serenely into Slough's handsome station (one of three Slough stations on the line, incidentally) – I wonder if we haven't got this the wrong way round. Why wouldn't Londoners want a place as dynamic and interesting as Slough within their borders?
Yes, we all know the John Betjeman poem ('Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough…') and the David Brent song ('More convenient than a Tesco Express/Close to Windsor but the property's less'). But do you know what the most productive place in Britain is, according to the Centre for Cities? It is not London or Cambridge or Edinburgh. It is Slough – and not by a little bit either. Every hour worked in Slough produces £70.90 for the national economy, compared with London's £45.80. This Berkshire town of 160,000 souls also has the highest start-up rate outside of London; it has the highest average workplace earnings outside of London; and it was found by this very newspaper in 2023 to be ' the ultimate commuter town ' based on a range of factors including travel time, green spaces, house prices and schools. Epsom, Weybridge, St Albans, Maidenhead – none can compete with Slough.
And yet it's also the place that prompts searching articles about Britain's malaise and another piece, also by this very newspaper, asking what went wrong for 'Britain's 'ugliest' town'. Slough seems to exist not only on the tri-border area between Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Greater London but in some confusing mental zone, too, at once a dynamic part of the modern British economy and a national embarrassment.
'The reputation is strange,' says Alan Johnson, the former Labour Home Secretary, who spent 18 years as a postman in Slough before entering politics via the Union of Communication Workers. 'It's a bit concrete-y in the town centre but that's the case with many of these new towns.'
Johnson was one of many London council tenants offered housing on Slough's Britwell estate in the late 1960s – and after a grim childhood in Notting Hill and Battersea, a two-bedroom house with front and back gardens on a former apple orchard was a dream come true.
'It wasn't 'come friendly bombs' for us. It was a beautiful place,' he says. There was always 'loads of work' too, thanks to the 474-acre Slough Trading Estate, which grew out of a dumping ground for military vehicles post the First World War. 'Even when you ran into the 1980s and there were three million people unemployed, it never really hit Slough.' There was always an 'interesting social mix', he adds, thanks to the waves of incomers who came in search of work, from Wales, London, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Eastern Europe. 'I mean the name doesn't help,' adds Johnson. 'But there's nothing wrong with Slough.'
So Slough is a paradox. It is at once a modern English success story and a literal byword for despair. It is a laboratory of the future whose glories seem firmly in the past. It is fast-changing but somehow stuck, too. Even the residents seem to have embraced contradiction. I collar Raju Singh, 20, a recent graduate smoking a rollie outside the Porter Building, a brand new enterprise space near the station. 'It's a unique place to grow up,' he says. 'But to be fair, it's just the same as everywhere else.'
Still, as we talk further, I sort of see what he means. Singh describes himself as typically Slough: 'I'm a first generation immigrant, Polish-Indian, which are the two biggest communities in Slough.' He likes the fact that he hears Polish in the streets but then again, 'You hear it all over the place now.' And in this sense, he says, Slough does have its own unique character. It's an interchange – on the M4, the M40, the M25, on the GWR mainline, near Heathrow – and as such a place people move through on the way to somewhere else. 'You just have to look at the opening credits of The Office. You see what it used to look like and what it looks like now,' he says. 'It's one of those places where everyone says they're trying to get out but people find themselves not able to.'
As for whether he feels it should be absorbed into London, he's not so sure. The snobbery, he is used to. 'People in Maidenhead and Windsor don't like that their postcode is associated with Slough. But where else are they going to dump their s---?'
'No worse than anywhere else'
I will be honest. As I navigate my way past the multi-storey car park and the burned-out bus station, over the A4 and the hoardings promising 'Luxury Flats', around the derelict Queensmere shopping centre and into a half-empty high street of gaming centres, betting shops and discount stores – my heart does not sing. 'This miry slough is such a place as cannot be mended,' was how John Bunyan characterised the metaphorical Slough of Despond in The Pilgrim's Progress and it's not hard to find locals who echo the sentiment.
'The only good thing about Slough is when you see it in the rear-view mirror,' says Anthony Goldstein, 59, who is out with his wife and grown-up children. 'It's just not looked after. The services have got worse. The centre is disgusting. I don't even walk down the high street any more. I'd move out tomorrow if I could.'
His daughter Heather, 20, is one of those people who tried to do just that but didn't quite manage it. 'I'm back here temporarily,' she says. 'It's not great. Not at all. My flat doesn't have heating. Our bins don't get picked up by the council. It's scary and yucky. Crime is a very big thing.'
A little further down the high street, I get talking to a homeless man who also seems stuck in the mire. 'I want to go back to Romania but I cannot go,' he tells me. 'I have been robbed! I have no ID, no phone, and everything is online. I am stuck in Slough because of system.' Even he thinks Slough town centre has declined in recent years. 'It was nice before pandemic, before Brexit. If I had a sum of money to go back to Romania, I would never come back here.'
Mindful that this is not necessarily a representative view, I approach a fruit and vegetable seller. He asks me if I know who Jamal Khashoggi was. Hang on, I ask, wasn't he the Saudi journalist who was murdered and dismembered on the orders of the Saudi Crown Prince? 'He asked too many questions too.'
To think, I only wanted to ask about council tax and Tube fares – but still, I can't say I blame him for his hostility. The internet has destroyed trust in journalists almost as surely as it has destroyed city centre retail. (Slough is at least ahead of the trend in investing heavily in data centres, the dumping ground of the internet.) And if I lived here, I would probably be fed-up with people like me arriving on the train to write articles about 'Britain's most miserable town'. My own city, Bristol, is usually written about in complimentary terms but I guarantee you, if you were to head to Broadmead shopping centre on a weekday afternoon, you too would cry 'swarm over, death!'
Roger Colegate, a chipper 86-year-old, who has lived in Slough all his life, puts it well. 'As you can see, it's all betting shops, charity shops, mobile phone shops,' he says. 'But it's no worse than anywhere else. And they're not the only council to be bankrupt, are they?'
And he's right about that. Slough Borough Council is not unique in its financial ruin, it's just a little ahead of the game. Almost halfof England's councils face bankruptcy, according to a recent National Audit Office report. And really, Slough town centre is not depressing because it is uniquely grim. It is depressing because it is grim in a way that almost e very British town centre is grim. It's a mirror, not a mire. In fact, this familiarity is what Betjeman was getting at in his infamous poem in which he used Slough as a symbol of the thoughtless development and small-minded monotony that characterised English life. Likewise, the reason we find David Brent funny isn't because he's from Slough. It's because the whole country recognises him.
Once you look beyond the obvious, a different Slough emerges. There are some interesting snippets of local history on the boarded up Marks & Spencers: did you know Slough was where the zebra crossing, the wheelie bin, the Mars Bar, Horlicks and the Cox's Orange Pippin were invented? Where William Herschel first glimpsed the Uranian moons, Oberon and Titania? Where Geri Halliwell 'found the inspiration' to compose her debut album?
Nor are Slough's glories solely in the past. There's a lively community centre in the old shopping centre and nature walks around Herschel Park. There's a really excellent central library. And in the smaller units to the east of the high street, I find a lively multicultural mix of food shops and restaurants, reminiscent of a buzzy London high street. There's even a fishmonger, always a bellwether of a healthy shopping district.
I head into a South Indian restaurant, Vasantha Vilas, where I order the vegetarian thali lunch special, no fewer than 11 separate dishes, £5.99, delicious. The restaurant manager, Azeem Basheer, used to manage a burger restaurant in central Slough. Now he is masterminding the expansion of Vasantha Vilas into a chain, and isn't authentic, healthy, regional Indian food progress, of sorts? 'We're expanding to 13 shops,' he says. 'The first is in East Ham. This is our second. There's a huge demand for authentic Indian restaurants right now.'
He agrees that the high street is a little worse for wear and spending power in Slough is low – hence the bargain pricing (the same thali is £9.99 in the London branch). Still, he blames the pandemic rather than the council. The Queensmere and Observatory shopping centres were purchased by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority in 2016 in anticipation of increased footfall that the Elizabeth Line would bring. It was long predicted that a Westfield-type mall would follow. Then Covid happened and sitting on the land proved the safer option.
The future's on hold
Slough Borough Council has been run by a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition since Labour lost control in 2023. Dexter Smith, the council leader, blames its perilous financial position on a series of catastrophic investments made by the previous Labour administration followed by a still more catastrophic attempt to reform its services. 'The assumption was that everyone could do everything online,' he says. 'They called it 'Our Futures'. It turned out not to be our future as they stopped it before it was finished.'
Now his council is attempting another reform: 'We have to square better outcomes with less resources.' It is not easy. He points to Slough's healthy life expectancy (HLE), which is 58.1 for males and 60.3 for females, around a decade lower than neighbouring Windsor. 'We can't afford to take our eye off those sorts of issues. It's life and death.'
Still, the way he describes it, Slough's problems are really by-products of its success. Slough generates lots of money, thanks to its trading estate, which is known as SEGRO and is home to 310 companies. Only the money doesn't necessarily stay in Slough – thanks to those stellar transport links. It has a booming population (Slough grew 33 per cent between the censuses of 2001 and 2021) and it is younger than the national average. Only it lacks the resources to cope with this, says Smith, pointing to a lower than average rate of university attendance.
'There are good jobs in Slough but Slough people are not getting them,' he says. 'There is a 25 per cent gap between what Slough firms pay and what Slough residents earn on average. Around 40,000 people leave Slough each day for work – mainly in low-paying jobs like baggage handling at Heathrow – while 40,000 people come into Slough. Or people come to Slough, get promoted and move out.'
Slough faces a host of 'London-type problems' including knife crime and a housing crisis, being cheap enough to serve as a dumping ground for the nearby London councils. 'People turn up at Heathrow, and Hillingdon say, we don't have capacity, why don't you try Slough? And because we don't have a proper housing department, we've been accommodating them.'
This, argues Smith, conceals another of Slough's strengths. 'Slough has absorbed migrant populations for the last 100 years. People came from the Welsh coalfields and found work in Slough. Then we had the Windrush generation, Indian and Pakistani migration, Afghans, East Europeans, we've had them all, and we continue to grow at a phenomenal rate. Culturally we are well equipped to do that and we do it really well. But no way are we resourced to deal with this latest iteration of it.'
One of his main hopes is to attract a university campus to central Slough (it lost the old Thames Valley campus in 2009), which would serve the twin purpose of revitalising the town centre and providing career development for Slough's young people. The shopping centres are meanwhile up for sale too and Smith hopes for a 'good, sympathetic transformation of the town centre' by the new owners.
Indeed, he begins to conjure an enticing vision of Slough's future – a Brixton-style world food market, a global cinema showing Bollywood movies and a new university campus driving up footfall. Perhaps even some new green space? And if the proposed western rail link to Heathrow were built, all of this would be only seven minutes from the world's busiest airport and Slough might finally become a destination in its own right as opposed to a place people pass through. 'We want people to be spending their pounds in Slough,' says Smith.
Andrew Carter, chief executive of the think tank Centre for Cities, echoes this vision. 'Slough is not like Cambridge or Brighton – its residents are choosing to spend money on high streets in London rather than locally. If Slough succeeds in regenerating its town centre though, other places on London's fringes could learn from this success.'
Would being part of London help all this? It's not entirely clear. The council must submit a full proposal to central government by November. Slough's economic success or failure is not really dependent on its governance but its location, argues LSE's Tony Travers. 'It's a pretty affluent place in the great scheme of things. The retail problems are more related to long-term changes in how people shop than the relative wealth of a town.'
There are genuine advantages that would follow from being swallowed up into London, not least cheaper Tube fares and free travel within London for the over-60s. The Metropolitan Police and London Fire Brigade would take over too. But this would be offset by higher council tax and a loss of autonomy which would appear contradictory to Labour's devolution efforts to empower areas outside of London. It would also set a precedent: if Slough, then why not Dartford, St Albans or Woking?
It would be cheering to think that Slough's future could be Slough-shaped. And in the meantime, there is plenty in Slough's present worth celebrating, says Dominique Unsworth, a film-maker and youth worker who tells me she moved to Slough from south-east London precisely because of its incredible cultural scene.
She describes it as an 'overgrown village' with all of the benefits of a diverse, modern, multicultural city. 'I honestly think Slough doesn't realise how lucky it is. When you come as an outsider, whether that's from another country or another bit of England, you think – my goodness. There's green countryside all around. The people are nice to each other. There's free entertainment in every community every night and everyone is always in each other's spaces.'
She feels the place to head is not the shopping centre but the Farnham Road that skirts the trading estate – a lively stretch of restaurants, shops and general community activity. 'Those of us who live in Slough would say, that's our high street. It's always rammed. We've got all of the food places there, all of the specialisms, our shops, our leisure centre, a couple of schools, all within five minutes walk.'
It's an absence she feels starkly when she ventures into the apparently more salubrious Maidenhead or Windsor. 'People don't talk to each other. There's a lot of isolation. They might volunteer for some nice causes but there's not much community. So you can live in a lovely leafy part of Berkshire, but will you feel safe? Will you feel you have people you can turn to? Will your children grow up in an environment where people respect each other's values even though they're different? Will they get the kind of world knowledge you get in Slough? People are so disrespectful because they think they live in a better place. But they'd be lucky to live in a place like Slough.'