A Walk Around Derelict Chalvey 

 

 

Abandoned shopping complex, Chalvey, Slough.

 

Virtually all the businesses have left this now derelict shopping complex, although a few diehards remain. Like a Wild West set at high noon, old leaves and bits of paper blow around in lonely wind vortices, and you can’t help but predictably hum the first few bars of the Specials’ song Ghost Town. The space is utterly deserted, as no man or creature has any business going there, with only the tumble-trash to remind you that civilisation hasn’t ended. As a result, the area has become totally obsolete as public space.

The faded blue and pink posts, the multi-coloured shopfronts– there was at least once an attempt to introduce some vibrancy to this part of Slough, some optimistic small-business dream, but it has not proved lasting; why, Slough is the home for big business, multinational household brands operating from the trading estate, smartly dressed companies that hire office space by the tens of thousands of cubed feet, not modest local efforts squatting in brown-brick units in Chalvey. At some point this complex will be ‘regenerated’ by the powers that be, but whether the public space and small-business retail provision will survive in the blueprints remains to be seen.