‘The Urban Building’, corner of Windsor Rd and Albert St.

 

Formerly occupied by some very dingy 60s office blocks, this site now hosts a new office development trendily named 'The Urban Building’ (you can just about see its name in white letters right at the top of the building). Annoying, generic, common noun names seem to be in vogue at the moment– we already have 'The Curve’, 'The Centre’ and 'The Foyer’ in town, and the previous owners of this building advertised it simply as '123 Windsor Rd’. Quite why the owners opted for such unassuming names is strange, as the building itself is anything but: eight storeys and a wide frontage set right onto the road is as in-yer-face as you can get.
 

The building is young, under ten years old, and is therefore 'contemporary’– this can mean only one thing: glass, glass, glass, baby. We are confronted with a wall of glass, stretching up like the vertical water at Niagara Falls, glass along the sides, glass behind the portico. Light aquamarine panelling alternates with the glass, completing the illusion of a blue sky reflection even if the weather doesn’t comply. A nod to structural expressionism gives us the mesh-wrapped fire-escape stairs on the left hand corner and external metal support girders, while the steel-flap eaves at the top are reminiscent of industrial chic– warehouses, airports, factories. The 'columns’ (poles, really) provide a visual, structural aesthetic but not much else, the portico not being wide enough to casually walk down; perhaps a smoke-breaker from the offices within could huddle against the cold there, but not much else.
 

The drawback to the grid pattern of glass and panelling, in that particular greenish shade, is that the whole frontage looks like a piece of graph-paper or, for us kids of the 80s, the light green lined 'computer paper’ we used to use for scribbling at school. It evokes the paraphernalia and dull practice of office-work: spreadsheets, accounting, graphs, figures. The pleasing colour cannot save it from being another office-drudgery-building as generic as its name. Its overall message seems to be 'Back to work Jenkins, that’s enough daydreaming’. It’s trying so hard to be cool and sober for Business People and Business Practice that it’s forgotten to be any fun, and remains professional, but cold and clinical. Work should be prestigious and precise, but never too much fun, it seems.
 

Is it an improvement on what was there before? Certainly. Is it oversized and overbearing for its site? Certainly. One of Slough’s finest churches and churchyard is directly next door (the dramatic Victorian-Gothic St Mary’s), and some also-listed buildings at Upton Hospital a few paces up from that, but little attention was paid them– this very large glass rectangle was dropped in by a mouse-click nonetheless to appease the office-god. But this merely continues a proud Slough tradition, as the buildings it replaces were equally at odds with the neighbours.
 

Locals complain that the bloody thing is often lit up like a Christmas Tree at night, while during the day it appears dead and dormant; to my knowledge, there hasn’t been a single company renting space in it since the day it was built. Like Slough Borough Council it is expecting a kind of miracle of business growth to occur after the Crossrail transport project is finished, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Slough has a loooot of offices to choose from these days.
 

UPDATE: The building is no longer empty! KP Snacks are to move in and a café is to open on the ground floor, possibly even open to the public.