A recent Rightmove survey of more than 35,000 people found that the quaint seaside town of Woodbridge, Suffolk, is the happiest place to live in the UK – meanwhile, my hometown of Slough, in Berkshire, was deemed the most miserable.
This is nothing new to me; Slough’s reputation as a hole has long preceded the results of the survey. Before it was renowned as the home place of The Office and dad-dancing David Brent, it was the topic of an infamous John Betjeman poem, which opens with the lines: ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now.’ Even as I was growing up, my mother would tell me to inform people I was actually from the nearby Windsor ‘because it sounds better’.
With Slough having boomed in popularity with city slickers who don’t know any better, following its inclusion on the Elizabeth line (data shows the town has seen the steepest rise in house prices in the Reading branch of the new rail line), estate agents have been quick to dismiss the results of the Rightmove poll. They say it’s still an appealing place to live and cite ‘great’ transport links, including its close proximity to both the M4 and Heathrow Airport. However, it’s not exactly a resounding endorsement that the best thing about Slough is that it’s easy to leave.
It’s not exactly a resounding endorsement that the best thing about Slough is that it’s easy to leave
Slough is, and always has been, the nation’s laughing stock – which is hardly surprising, given that one of its most known landmarks is a roundabout that was formerly sponsored by Honda. Even I can’t help but laugh at the things I’ve seen there; a particular low point was watching a man serenade a bin with a ukelele in the Tesco carpark near the train station. All that said, I do feel uncharacteristically defensive of my hometown when people deride it as being little more than a punchline.
A quick Google will inform you that Slough is home to the largest industrial estate of its kind in Europe, but there’s more to the town than grey office blocks. The high street was where I spent most of my youth – a place which still reminds me of the sweet, delicious freedom of being able to walk around without the prying eyes of parents. If we didn’t head into town after school (a 10-minute trip on the 58 bus, where we’d blare music from the tinny speakers of a flip phone), we’d make plans to meet on Saturday afternoon by The Bird Tree, a big and somewhat out of place metallic sculpture in the town centre by the cinema. Armed with small amounts of pocket money, we’d flit between the Observatory and Queensmere shopping centres, frittering our money away on the heavily discounted outlet Topshop (long may it rest) and occasionally picking up small cups of sweetcorn to snack on from street vendors.
Birthday parties typically took place at Slough ice rink or the nearby leisure centre, with trips to the Pizza Hut buffet afterwards – though fancier affairs meant heading to Airport Bowl up the motorway. Teenage first dates took place at one of Slough’s two Nandos, both in walking distance of each other (though one, regrettably, is now closed) or trying to get into the Wernham Hoggs bar (named after the famous paper merchants from The Office, and also now closed). It was never fancy; Slough is a typical commuter town – not quite far enough away from London to develop its own identity, but it was all we needed as skint teenagers to have a good time.
It was summertime when Slough really came into its own, particularly as we got older, and our horizons were broadened beyond driving to the McDonalds drive-thru at lunch time. We’d often head to Black Park, one of Slough’s overlooked vast green spaces, with its reputation as an industrial wasteland obscuring its patches of Home Counties countryside. We’d take a picnic and sit in the grass, watching the sky turn from blushed to bruised as the hours passed. Other sunny days were spent strolling along the banks of the Jubilee River, or heading to Upton Court Park for Slough Mela in August – a day festival and fun fair that celebrated the talents of the town’s thriving Asian community. Despite being a large town (the 2021 census showed a healthy population of 158,500), it always felt small, and close-knit; you’d forever be bumping into someone who knew someone which had its benefits (wanting to get with a friend’s hot cousin) and its drawbacks (constantly seeing your friend’s hot cousin after regrettably getting with them).
I’ve lived in London for nearly a decade now, but I returned home earlier this year to nurse my mother following a knee operation. Those teenage summers seemed like another lifetime, as I returned to drizzle and slush, with storefronts closed and few friends left from that time. I felt dismal at being back, the town seeming emptier and far more hostile than it had previously. Seeing the high street become a shell of its former self didn’t help (the big tree is still there), but what made Slough feel so vibrant back then was thanks to the girls I called my best friends at the time; memories which I now only hold in my heart. Their ghosts haunt the increasingly empty town centre. Without the fibres of them knitted into every shop, every café, every lazy Saturday afternoon, Slough is just another faceless town creeping on London’s border.
A few weeks ago, my boyfriend came and visited Slough for the first time, and as an outdoorsy Australian, I worried he would be snooty about the grey landscape and bleak weather. But as we strolled by the river with coffee cups in hand, he said he liked the area without any trace of irony.
‘It’s not always considered the nicest of towns,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Home is what you make it.’
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