A Look at the Old Slough Estates Office Building

 

 

 

 

The Mayan temple meets the monolith: Former Segro Offices, Bath Rd (completed 1975, demolished 2014)

 

This building was commissioned to serve as the headquarters of Slough Estates, the company that operates the Trading Estate. It was one of Slough’s most distinctive buildings, and certainly the best example of the Brutalist style in the area. Completed in 1975, it arranged pre-formed concrete panelling and bronzed glass in an inverted ziggurat, with an unassuming, almost hidden entrance and an identical plan on all four aspects.

 

Uncompromising, immovable and unyielding, the daintiness of the early 20th century and the precise fussiness of Modernism well and truly buried under a thousand tonnes of blunt primitivism. There is no ornament, because here form is ornament– the building can only be assessed as a whole structure rather than by dwelling on any particular feature. Roof? Unimportant. Entrance? Unimportant. Surface? Unadorned. Orientation? Irrelevant. Impact? Instant and slightly scary, as Brutalism should be.

 

 

Some vintage shots of the building's construction in the 70s.

 

 

 

The building served as a headquarters for the company that controls the whole Trading Estate and was thus designed to be a class apart, drawing from the pagan rather than the classical or Christian; cathedrals are for choral singing and bake sales, ancient Brutalist temples are for genuflection and human sacrifice. The dark, impenetrable bronzed window space suggests the depths of a cave or the shadows beneath the dolmens of a megalithic structure, continuing the primal, primitive feeling evoked by Brutalism in general and the layered, prehistoric structure of this building in particular. Architectural Review described it as "the Modern Movement's answer to the Doric temple... the device of the oversailing storeys and the columnar peristyle give an impression which is rightly called 'monumental'. Such a building, you instinctively feel, could never die".

 

But sadly it is no more. In 2014 it joined so many of its Brutalist brothers and sisters in disappointing destruction, to be replaced by something bigger, and brighter and bolder-- something with more glass, of course-- and Slough lost one of its most iconic structures.

 

 

Taken during its demolition, the above shot gives a handy cross-section of the building, dispelling the myth that Brutalist buildings were all composed of solid concrete metres thick. Here we see that the outer structure is actually a shell just a few inches thick wrapped around the frame of the building, which is itself a lattice of steel-reinforced concrete slabs. Humble brickwork then makes up some of the interior walls.

 

A barely forty-year lifespan actually wasn’t bad for a modern commercial building– their usual lifespan is usually barely half that. Commerce hates nostalgia, and baulks at the idea of conservation– it’s all about tomorrow’s fashions, tomorrow’s glamour, associating business prominence and commercial capability with ever newer designs, concepts and chic. In the world of digital platforms, app development and smart space, Brutalism went out with the brick telephone and the milk float; a sad loss, in this new world of the intangible, the disposable and the indifferently-designed.

 

 

Three Picture Story

From the Friendly-Bombs archives: Three pictures tell a tiny story of life in the under-class

 

 

This short Victorian terrace used to stand on the Bath Road, at numbers 150-160. A few years ago Slough Borough Council decided to condemn the row to demolition, as part of a bludgeoning scheme of road-widening along the Bath Road. The houses were bought up with compulsory purchase orders, the occupants moved out, and then, as usual, the gears slowed down. During the lull in development, the buildings were let for five years (until 2009) to a social landlord, after which the council toyed with the idea of renovating the now-derelict houses to serve as temporary accommodation for Slough’s homeless but decided against it, saying that it wouldn’t be cost-viable. No compromise was offered.

 

 

With the houses standing vacant for so long, homeless people moved in; the front was boarded up, but you could see washing hanging in the overgrown back gardens. People were now living there, whether the Council had approved it or not. Despite this, and although they were still waiting for a final decision on funding for the road-widening, the Council decided to press ahead with demolition to ‘demonstrate the Council’s commitment’ to the traffic plan. Eviction notices appeared on the doors of the houses telling the homeless people inside to clear off.

 

 

 

For a little while afterwards you could see the aftermath of the eviction littered outside: bedding, simple furniture, clothes and in particular lots of shoes- the latter being particularly telling as amongst the pile you could see men’s, women’s and children’s shoes. Here we see these meagre accoutrements of lives on the edge now literally lying on the edge of the busy road, a testament to the layer of precarious lives that exist almost invisibly within busy, bustling towns and cities.

 

A little while later the buildings came down, but as of Summer 2016 there is no advance on the road-widening scheme or the promised residential redevelopment of the rest of the space; it simply remains as an overgrown, empty gap. There is no mention in the Council reports of what happened to the people who, for a while, called it home and were then moved on like human tumbleweed, and for many this will be a non-story; but it’s hard to let go of the feeling that, with the sight of peoples’ garments blowing down the street in the car-breeze, a sad little human episode happened here, and was swiftly forgotten. 

 

 

A Walk Around Waterside Grange, a New Housing Development Near the Canal

 

 

 

Waterside Grange is a new housing development built on a strip of land directly adjacent to the canal. Signs near the entrance trump that government‘s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme is available and that the scheme includes ‘affordable homes’ as well as shared ownership schemes.

 

 

The development is quite densely built, with much of the housing having three to five storeys, and not much area other than car parking space in between them. This small patch of green (above) with a few trees planted on it is the closest thing to a communal space, although in reality it is simply the leftover ground in between two sides of car park spaces. There are no benches or seats anywhere, but if the trees grow to a respectable height and are allowed to mature, then it might become something of a focal point in the future; if they don’t then, well, there’s somewhere for the dog to go.

 

 

 

(Above) Bad habits creep into the architectural design of this new housing development: a surfeit of red brick, tired vernacular references and hints of the unsubtle, defensive design of council estates. Here, a cheerless red-brick stretcher-bond wall replaces what would have been a wooden garden fence or verdant hedge in a more aspirational design. Contrary to popular speculation, brick walls don’t make for better security; ironically, thanks to their sturdiness they can be scaled much more easily in a way that a flimsy wooden garden fence can’t. The two-tone colour scheme of white weatherboarding and blue panelling on red brick, repeated across much of the development, seems lazy and uninspired in what is ostensibly a step-up from the ‘affordable’ developments of the past, referencing a boring, overused vernacular that would best left in the sixties where it belongs; it’s a shame that the development should wear its ‘affordability’ so clearly on it sleeve.

 

 

Overuse of tired vernacular clichés betray a kind of disinterested cheapness in the design of this affordable housing development: a forest of gables assaults the resident at every angle, from every angle. While the bad habits of rigid rectilinear planning have been avoided, the high density of the development gives it a slightly clustered, cluttered feel, with the sight of so many gables and similar features repeated so often in a small space seeming absurd at first, then boring, then annoying. It feels like British domestic house design simply gave up some time ago, and all we are left with is lacklustre photocopies of yesterday’s textbooks.

 

 

Tall buildings, narrow streets and a lack of front garden/buffer areas give the streets here a slight canyon-feel, a close-packed intimacy between neighbours that is unlikely to blossom into much of a community identity without communal or focal areas and that has been derived from the desire to put in as much housing as possible. Like all modern housing developments there are no corner shops, benches or real public garden space to commune in, and barely even anywhere leftover to park an ice-cream van.

 

 

This row of mostly detached houses does not face into the centre of the development as most of the rest of the buildings here do, instead they look outwards and onto the scenic canal that Waterside Grange is built next to. Differing brick-stock, inset upper-level and balcony, a smidgen of front garden and brown wood panelling channelling Scandinavian design lend them a chic smartness not found in the rest of the estate, and even the predictable gables seem fresher with the wide eaves, the panelling extending all the way up and a warmer tile style for the roof.

But squeezed in like sardines, the sides of the houses are lost to each other and to the sunlight, which sadly approaches from the wrong angle to help the North-facing fronts of these houses; perhaps the agreeable view of the canal makes up for this.

That said, these are still the pick of the bunch in this development. There is a definite step up in design (even if this row continues the maximum-density mantra by packing in as many as possible without breathing space) which makes me wonder if these are included as ‘affordable homes’ in the development, or has the bettered design been reserved for full market-rate sales only? Why do none of the neighbouring boring, generic red-brick ’n’ white weatherboarding (and almost certainly ‘affordable’) houses face the canal as these do, are they not worthy of the view too?

 

 

The red-brick neo-Georgian townhouse style reaches its most reduced and minimalist form. Usually associated with 30s council houses, the style is basic, familiar, competent and of course dull; it’s the digestive biscuit of domestic architecture (no, not the chocolate ones). With a desire for a communal area but no actual space devoted as such the neighbourhood kids play on the street, reclaiming the road from the cars (made possible by not having any ‘through’ traffic and by the development having enough corners to make fast-moving vehicles unlikely).

 

 

So all in all a fairly decent development, but with a few let-downs--on one hand some interesting housing at one edge and a cosy street arrangement, but a lack of communal space, over-density and a majority of disappointingly-designed buildings on the other. The development does well to combine family houses with apartments to bring some social diversity to the neighbourhood, but with so much of it being clearly limited in design to conform to the dismissive, stingy attitude to affordable housing the development as a whole struggles to escape its imposed mediocrity.

 

There are several building types on offer here and some are smart and competent, but many regurgitate lazy habits from the past, echoing decades of architecture reflecting social limitation. Traditionally, at the bottom we have the punitively-designed and visually grim social housing, at the top the optimistically-designed and considerately-approached private/speculative housing; Waterside Grange falls awkwardly in between, in that large middle band of aesthetically-capped better-than-social-but-still-not-great ‘affordable home/help to buy’ class. If people in social housing are supposed to deserve nothing, and people at the top everything, then those in the middle are deemed to deserve… a bit, but not too much; the inhabitants are enticed and cherished as buyers but disdained as those who still need economic assistance, and as always the architecture reflects this.

 

 

 

 

 

A Look at the Former Orchard County School (Latterly the West Wing Centre, Recently the New Arbour Park Stadium)

 

 

 

The Orchard County Secondary School building, latterly the West Wing centre (completed 1952, demolished 2016)

 

Originally built as the Orchard County Secondary School, what was more recently known as the West Wing centre was designed by the County Architect’s Department and completed in 1952; it was also included in Slough’s entry in Pevsner’s guide to Buckinghamshire. Past tense for this one: the building has been recently demolished to make way for a new football stadium. Constructed from a steel frame with brick panels, the functional 50s Modernism is typical of postwar school design: always the geometrically-precise arrangement of windows, always the flat roof, always the preponderance of rectangles. What distinguishes this design is the squat observation tower (complete with an antenna that was added in the 80s) which adds elevation and draws the eye; many a pupil’s first thought upon seeing it must have been “I wanna go up the tower!!”. The wall clock is a stylish addition, but had been neglected for many years (as is sadly the case with most public clocks these days) before the building’s demolition a few months ago.

 

As mentioned, the site is now home to a new football stadium that will be a home ground for Slough Town FC (aka the Rebels), who despite their modest history still enjoy the deep support of local fans, and have been a part of Slough culture since 1890. The club was previously based at Wexham Park stadium, off Wexham Road, (which has now been converted into a functions venue called ‘The Park’, yet another attempt to be pseudo-chic by referring to yourself as an unspecified common noun, see ‘The Curve’, ‘The Foyer’, ‘The Urban Building’ etc etc) but after disagreements with the landowners left the stadium and spent a number of years squatting uncomfortably on other teams' venues.

 

 

So the team definitely need a home, but whether this exact spot was the best place for it is debatable. Is it really ideal for a football stadium to be directly across the road from a crematorium and cemetery? Isn’t the traffic up Stoke Road already crazy enough? Wouldn’t a prime spot like that be better suited for wholly residential purposes? The Rebels could definitely do with a home ground, but football stadiums don’t necessarily need to be completely ensconced within towns; a similar plot up the Wexham Road, or one off the more robust Uxbridge Road may have been better. No curmudgeonly grouchiness intended: it is simply that the days when Slough could cheerfully fit cricket grounds and greyhound tracks easily within her borders are long gone, meaning every inch of developable space must be keenly scrutinised. But on the plus side, community sport returns to the town, hopefully in a way that will evoke the memories of the old Dolphin Stadium off the Uxbridge Road that so many misty-eyed old-timers recall.

 

 

Brownfield of Dreams: A Look at Idling Brownfield Sites

 

 

 

Build it and they will come: idling brownfield site, corner of High St and Church St

 

Now being used as one of Slough’s many impromptu car parks, this large expanse of land situated right in the lucrative town centre has been languishing in development limbo for a number of years. The planning permissions, currently collecting cyber dust on Slough council’s website, promise a massive multi-faceted, multi-storeyed development of retail, office, hotel and residential space, but not a brick has been laid.

 

This site, and a good few others like it dotted around town, are perfect examples of the problem of idling brownfield sites in urban areas where housing and other provisions are running at a shortage.

The swiftness with which the developers despatched the existing buildings (including some locally listed survivors of Slough’s Victorian old town) is inversely mirrored by the length of time it has taken to move this plan on; the scheme was granted permission back in 2008 but has since applied for extensions. While the economic downturn years may not have been an opportune time to start a big venture, there isn’t any wider economic excuse why work can’t start now; after all, major work is happening all over the town except in these blots of cleared, static brownfield.

 

Elsewhere in Slough, public parks are being built over to provide houses and cruddy office blocks repurposed without exterior redesign as residential flats, while sites like this sleep in the sun. But these sites are more than just eyesores and wastes of space, they dishearten the resident; familiar, cherished scenes and buildings are demolished in a blink of an eye with no timely successor, implying almost a kind of contempt for the local, whose town is hastily razed but seemingly not important enough to be replanted. Annoyance at wasted land is more keenly felt when insensitive plans are being enacted elsewhere, ostensibly because of a lack of housing space, while massive, empty, idling areas taunt the local like gaps in a six year-old’s teeth. They smother town character and identity and spurn the spirit of urbanism; it’s like living next door to a neighbour who flouts a hose-pipe ban, making you feel a bit of a sucker for accepting the withering of your own plants while they ignore the concerns of the wider world and keep theirs lush and wet. Time for local government to get tough?

 

 

 

ICI office building (now AkzoNobel), Wexham Road (built 1956-7)

Designed by T.P. Bennett & Sons and built over 1956 and 57, this distinctive office complex was built for the ICI paint company, which had already been resident at the site for some years. It is designed as a tri-radial star, with three prongs stretching out with green garden in between the northern wings and parking space to the sides of the southern wing. This unusual plan coupled with its modest height (only four storeys) places it at odds with the kind of office buildings being built today– generic glass and steel cubes extending ever higher and with a cynical view of character and design, dismissive of the aesthetic considerations of the passer-by.

 

Here its moderate late fifties modernism (a style that would very quickly become mundane itself) still retains a little elegance, warmth from the use of light brick and informality from the curved line where the wings intersect and the differing angles of the wings to each other (the building’s wings do not span a rigid equilateral triangle but more of an elongated Y shape). The unassuming entrance can just about be seen on the left of the picture by the garden area. If the building has a downfall, it is the sheer area around it dedicated purely to funneling in, checking and parking cars; even a good picture needs a decent frame.

 

 

Sun Shines on an Empty Parking Lot: Car Parks and Urban Sprawl

 

 

Sun shines on an empty parking lot...

 

The consummate space-eater, as Lewis Mumford might have described it, the car park is as much a feature of Slough’s mundane industrial landscape as the smokestacks of the old factories and the glass and steel facades of the office mega-blocks. The above shot was admittedly taken out of hours when there are fewer cars parked here, but the principle still stands: car parks waste a hell of a lot of space, covering large areas that may have seemed quite normal and expected as adjuncts to industrial spaces in the past, but are now becoming ever more conspicuous as wasted area as space in the town runs perilously short.

 

Car parks such as these enjoy peak usage for up to half of the day, usually Monday to Friday, and exist as redundant space for the rest of the week. They do not perform any other function. In the bird’s eye-view of the same space (below) we see that the space devoted to simply storing cars while you’re at work dwarfs the size of the actual buildings the parking lots serve, and they’re big buildings.

 

 

Such senseless sprawl makes for a flabby and discontent landscape, distended over larger distances than needs be, and visually mundane for local and visitor alike. The sheer lack of imagination involved in car park design adds to their misery; not a tree, bush, shrub or blade of grass interrupts the tyranny of tarmac (a good metaphor for the town of Slough, as it happens), and its completely-levelled topography makes for a disheartening and endless vista, a vast sea of asphalt without any hint of dry land to comfort the urban sailor.

 

Increasingly, modern industrial and business developments (and these days even some high-density residential blocks) are taking the wise and over-due step of raising their buildings on piloti and having the cars park underneath; this is simple sense and makes for an elegant solution to minimising the space devoured by the automobile. Older developments such as these pictured (1950's offices) rarely have such provisions, as they were built when space was relatively plentiful, and during an era of unchallenged economic growth and dogma; we look back at them now as unimaginable sprawl.

 

Incidentally, there’s no shame in the humble multi-storey; mundane and uninspiring they may be, but if done correctly (see this post, for example) multi-level car parks can be unobtrusive solutions to high-density parking needs. By using a subterranean level, a ground level and utilising the roof as more open-air space you can effectively triple an area’s parking capacity with only a single-storey building. Drivers (who tend to be habitual moaners anyway) may whinge at the extra time taken to park in multi-storeys, but this is a small price to pay compared to the benefits of relieving valuable space in an already crammed town; there’s certainly no excuse for business/industrial parking not to follow these templates.

 

 

 

 

A Walk around Tamarisk Way & Pendeen Court, Cippenham

 

 

 

Pedestrian entrance to social housing complex at Tamarisk Way, Cippenham

 

The only thing missing from this happy vista is a regular patrol of greatcoat-wearing guards barking orders in German accompanied by Alsatian dogs straining at the leash. The dingy architecture, the humourless symmetry of the buildings, the joyless communal lawns, the unnecessarily fenced entrance all serve to give this complex a charming concentration-camp vibe that can only mean one thing: social housing. And indeed, this development does contain a high proportion of council-rented flats.

The small, prison-like windows look out onto a shared lawn area that boasts a couple of scraggly bushes and stunted firs but no mature, full-size trees; all that’s missing is a watchtower and barbed wire. There are no benches or any area to stop at. As nothing is to be ’wasted’ on these people, there’s no garden, or even any allowance for residents to create their own. There aren’t even any flowers.

The blocks are identical in size and style, with little discernible divisions between where one flat ands and the next one starts. There is no variation in elevation or angle. The brickwork is doom-laden and the building entrances as unceremonious as a gas-bill. The dark window frames, a favourite of 1980s house design, add to the barracks-like feel and the general despair of the place.

 

Well, you’re not here to be entertained: the rules of social housing are in full effect, with individuality replaced by a levelled, communal underclass identity, with no visual stimulation or aesthetic quality that would make you want to linger, and a bland, institutional feel that belies any attempt at social support or mobility and heads for a kind of collective punishment instead. Like a kind of lower-class social POW camp, there is to be no escape. (*Bang!* thud.)

 

 

(Above) Taken from the communal lawn area at the centre of the development. With only the flat grass patch and the joylessly-squared hedge (somebody put it out of its misery, please!) to flatter the eye outside, the residents instead beam in aesthetic pleasure from afar using their satellite dishes. No birds do sing, no kids do play… The green space might have been a bit more lively, but the small sign on the right gives the usual ‘NO BALL GAMES’ order, which is a kind of shorthand for ‘no kids’, ‘no frivolity’ and ‘no fun’.

The depressing nature of the buildings continues undiminished, and even the merged gable in the corner doesn’t break the monotony-- if anything it makes the place look slightly creepier, as if two unwilling entities were forcibly merged into the same space, an apt metaphor for social housing if ever I heard one.

 

 

The other side of the communal lawn. The complex looks a little worse for wear, despite only being built around 1990.

 

 

 

Pendeen Court complex, Tamarisk Way

Many of Slough’s vulnerable end up along Tamarisk Way, including the homeless or about-to-be-homeless. The area sees its fair share of crime too, with local crime reports over the last decade giving Tamarisk Way as the address of people variously convicted of dealing Heroin, knife possession, kidnapping and beating, robbing, and in one disturbing case, terrorizing neighbours with loud music, threatening behaviour and by posting excrement through their letterboxes. A couple of years ago the local playground lost some of its equipment to arson.

The council-owned flats are far from charming too. Residents in Pendeen Court complained earlier this year that they had been without hot water for five days, with one couple adding that the squalid flat they had been moved into had a broken toilet seat, broken pipes and “blood all over the floor by the cooker in the kitchen, lifted tiles, a broken cupboard that is thick with black mould underneath”.

 

Meanwhile this family lives here at the mercy of the council with the threat of being moved across the country to Doncaster dangling overhead, as the council has difficulties in housing people in Slough-- a symptom suffered before by the victims of Slough’s housing crisis (the last time this was reported in the local press the affected people were offered housing in Leicester, which at a mere hundred-odd miles away seems practically next door when compared to Doncaster ).

 

All this will come as no surprise to anyone viewing this area; it looks punitively depressing and that’s exactly the intended effect. Like all social housing it is partly a punishment, perhaps designed to encourage people not to linger on the public purse but more likely designed simply as a reflection of the way people at the lower end are supposedly to be viewed, with their need of charity resented and their social backgrounds loathed, worthy of contempt and undeserving of solace. It is a place designed to contain the undesired and the uncherished, with poorly-furnished flats for poorly-furnished lives and an architecture as grim and merciless as the forces that toss these people around like so much human flotsam.

 

 

 

Time has been called on this old alleyway (as you can tell by the ominous white planning proposals pinned to the side), as it looks like the derelict plot where the Floral Arms pub used to stand is finally going to be redeveloped. This blog has mentioned the importance of shortcuts and alleyways before, so it’s a shame to see this one go-- as shown by the picture it’s actually quite a well-trodden shortcut, with no fewer than six people walking up and down it in the half-minute or so friendly-bombs took to get this shot. The notice gives a time period for objections to be made, but since when have local objections made a difference to the Council?

 

 

PS If anyone’s wondering what the story is with the derelict area where the Floral Arms and Nationwide building society branch used to stand, the plan is to build a four storey mixed use building with financial/retail units on the bottoms and flats on top. (there was no room in the brief for one of Slough’s original Victorian pubs, so the Floral Arms came down). The planning brief is from 2008, so why exactly it has taken so long to get things moving is unclear-- surely they’re not sitting on prime town-centre land merely waiting for property prices to rise?

 

 

PPS: Local legend has it the Floral got its name after a visit to the High Street by Queen Victoria, who was looking to buy some flowers and later approved the addition of a flower stall in front of the building. The pub itself was opened in the 1880s, and the stall survived into recent memory as a fruit’n’veg stand. The pub was demolished around 2006, much to the consternation of local drinkers as it had a late license and was often the only option after 11pm for those seeking further inebriation.

 

 

Regeneration in Chalvey

 

The wheels of regeneration have finally started to turn on this plot in East Chalvey, previously occupied by a derelict petrol station (see this post). The plot is predictably and reasonably destined for residential use, but as usual the new rules of redevelopment have turned what should be a simple matter into another forehead-rubbing cause for concern.

 

The plot is of a middling size, and would probably be best suited to a half-dozen or so decently-sized family homes with gardens, but the plan goes much further, with the planning proposal demanding two 3-bed homes plus no fewer than 24 1-bed flats in a 4/5 storey building (the brief says four storeys and a mansard level, which is a sly way of saying, er, five storeys). Parking for 16 cars plus bike storage for 24 bikes is also promised.

 

This penchant for packing lots of people together in tight proximity to neighbouring housing is a feature of the modern style of (over)development. Just a couple of hundred yards around the corner is the stretch of Windsor Road that Slough Borough Council wish to redevelop with three consecutive blocks of flats up to six storeys high, and a few doors up is the massive, looming Aspects Court, one of the first mountain-blocks to be built in Slough and the trendsetter for development in the area- that’s a lot of people and traffic to be adding in a short space of time. As usual, the concerns of the neighbours falls on indifferent ears; certainly some of those living nearby will lose sunlight and privacy in their gardens.

 

The planning brief is predictably sly. It says that a previous bid to build 38 flats on the site was refused partly because it didn’t include enough family homes, and “given the location of the site, outside of Slough Town Centre, new residential development should predominantly consist of family housing”. The accepted plan offers a grand total of, er, two family homes and still has lots of flats (see Planning Permission Tricks #1: Door in the Face Technique”).

 

The main justification it gives for squeezing in a load of flats on this plot is that there are other blocks of flats around, so another one won’t make any difference: “…there are numerous examples of more intensive developments including those for flats in the locality which indicate the transitional and evolving character of the area”, it says, citing the hulking Aspects Court as an example. Somewhat dubiously it also lists the 3-storey Alexandra Plaza shopping arcade some 300 metres down the road as an example, and also a modest residential block on The Crescent street nearby that it describes as having four storeys, but for the life of me I can only count three.

 

“Given the on-going adverse impact on the street scene arising from the existing condition of the site, it is considered that the design and impact on the street scene of the proposal would constitute an enhancement and on this basis would be acceptable”, it says at one point, meaning that because the site is currently derelict their development will be clearly preferable. But this is specious reasoning, as pretty much any development would appear better than a rotting petrol station; it’s a good argument for regeneration, but it in no way justifies the current plan of cramming in two houses and 24 flats. 

 

The importance of blocking and amending insensitive developments therefore becomes clear: give ‘em an inch and they’ll clearly take a yard, with each new developer pointing at the previous development as justification for their own plans. Because it has been allowed once, they argue, it should be allowed over and over again, but this is how areas get ruined, with each development thinking only for itself and not for the area as a whole. And if dubious arguments can be passed off successfully in planning proposals, one wonders why we even have them in the first place.

A Comparison of Urban Boundaries

 

 

Here we see the interface between two different worlds– the sequestered, modern complex of Pickfords Gardens on the left, the back garden walls of Baylis Road, a tired, seen-better-days 1920s street-full-of-semis, on the right. Pickfords Gardens comprises a fenced-off cul-de-sac of large modern apartment buildings with private parking and an adjoining patch of bland green space for the residents; Baylis Road, on the other side, is a fairly busy through-road with identical semi-detached houses on both sides. The street itself offers little in the way of public or private space, but the houses have modest back gardens and the slightly dingy Baylis Park is nearby.

 

Fences are faintly fascinating things, at least they are to friendly-bombs; in an urban setting, they speak volumes about the properties they protect and the neighbourhood they cross. They are a visual representation of the socio-economic status (both real and pretended) of the resident, plus the fears, paranoia, conceit, pretensions, stylish fancies, social mobility, local pride and even DIY skill of the owner. The rule is generally simple: barriers at the front are for show, barriers at the back are for security.

 

The barrier on the left is a uniform metal palisade, too high and spiky to be scaled, with a hedge on the other side; those inside will see a line of greenery, those outside the impassive railings. What is interesting about it is that it is not actually a complete wall– there is an entrance just behind the picture that is open to all, meaning that even from this pedestrian path, everywhere on the left of the picture can be easily accessed. The barrier is therefore more for show, a psychological wall that discourages trespassing without physically prohibiting it, and that doubles up as a display of the well-maintained modernity and relative wealth of Pickfords Gardens.

 

The hedge running next to it is telling: all developments seeking to appear upwardly mobile will use greenery in their boundaries– privet hedges and amateur topiary in the housing of yesteryear, slender garden trees and exotic bushes in today’s; greenery is in fact an indication of wealth generally, with the most deprived areas being immediately recognisable as such by the absence of plants and trees, while the socially-ambitious areas are keen to show off their carefully-curated vegetation– even the very name of this development is Pickfords Gardens. 

 

On the right, it’s every man for himself. Jerry-built breeze-block walls, corrugated iron, patches of old wooden fencing and rotting vegetation make up the boundary; there’s even an old door nailed across a gap at one point. Successions of residents have used any modest means available to shore up their back walls against intruders– they’re not so much walls as barricades. Local ne’er-do-wells use the path at night and daub the haphazard walls with graffiti, something that the Pickfords railings are naturally impervious to.

 

The natural consequence of having short stretches cared for by different owners, coupled with the insufficient income of the residents and apathy of the landlords, means that the Baylis Road side is an unordered, ramshackle mess, but also a quite human-looking one too. The resourcefulness of those on modest means faces off against the pre-prepared tidiness of the modern estate, where you simply move into a environment where everything has already been taken into account– the security, the view, the gardening, where you will park– by unseen designers and absent administrators. Looking at the two barriers together it is as if the sterilised, hygienic functionalism of the Pickfords Gardens boundary is a reaction not just to the possibility of crime, but to the unpredictable, erratic nuisance human society that lurches haphazardly on the right, overgrown and graffiti-ed, rusting and genuine, unbothered by pretension and comfortable with its imperfection, warts and all.

 

 

 

New Apartment Building, Buckingham Gardens

 

 

 

New apartment building, Buckingham Gardens

 

The sun shines on a new development: this multi-storey residential apartment block was recently completed and replaces a forgettable four-storey office building. The colour scheme is bronze, beige and grey (according to the planning application specs the horizontal stripes are of ‘zinc or anodised metal’) and comprises six storeys. Nearly everybody gets a balcony, constructed of slightly ill-fitting-looking panels and with the underside left exposed; also, the sides of the balconies don’t quite reach the walls, being about six inches removed. Perhaps this was another lazy attempt at the deconstructed structural expressionist style that’s oh-so-vogue at the moment, but it comes across as simply shoddy and cynical– the building looks jerry-built and unfinished. It was with a surprised expression that friendly-bombs first walked past and saw lights on and people inside, and thought “Really? That’s it? That’s finished?”.

 

Another annoying quirk that is cropping up on modern architects’ ticksheets is the irregular arrangement of windows, or in this case balconies. Perhaps the original thinking was that it would look cute or naughty to have a random positioning of what are usually regular, symmetrical features, but it certainly doesn’t look great here, with an undecided, half-hearted deployment of strict spacing and alignment on the sides but baffling irregularity in the centre; the fact that there appears to be two balconies missing just makes it worse, giving it a kind of amateurish, dodgy third world bodge-job appearance, the kind of thing you see in dire buildings in Russia or China built by the constructively challenged, complete with lampposts in front of windows, stairs that don’t align with entrances, doors that open out on the third floor etc, like these hilarious examples I found online:

 

 

We must locate these geniuses. A job in modern British architecture awaits!

 

 

 

 

Another shot of the new apartment building on the corner of Church Street and Herschel Street. Overall it has a half-finished, temporary feel to it, like a kind of modern pre-fab that hasn’t been built to last.

 

Here the humble fire escape has been turned into a major structural feature of the building– another modern cliché that fails to fool anyone as original anymore. Bafflingly, it is enclosed in a kind of metal mesh, that surely fails as shelter and has presumably been used to make the feature knowingly bland and utilitarian– the same design conceit that deliberately seeks out ugly clothing and thick-framed ‘nerd’ glasses as a kind of sophomoric statement against the mainstream. Fun fact: half the people who wear ‘nerd’ glasses don’t even need them.

 

 Additional: It is at least good to see some of Slough’s interminable office buildings being redeveloped for residential use, even if it is for the predictable ‘luxury flats’ (the luxury’s on the inside, presumably)– there’s a 2-bed currently listed for a paltry £289k, if you’re interested. For a long time it was considered sacrilege for Slough to lose an office even when they were cropping up on every corner; even the planning application for this building wailed that “whilst the loss of relatively modern office accommodation in a central location is regrettable the prospect of it being reused for that use is unlikely in the near future. As the location and immediate surroundings are reasonable for flatted residential accommodation the principle of the loss of the office to residential use is acceptable.” Gee, there might be a housing crisis at the moment, but won’t somebody please think about the offices?!

 

 

30 Bath Road, or Why I Hate Glass Balconies

 

Residential housing design conflating with office architecture– the building does not look all that different from many of the large office buildings it shares this stretch of the Bath Road with; the over-use of steel and glass coupled with the strips of grey panels and windows is the kind of thing you would expect in a building you push pens in, not one you sleep in (indeed, friendly-bombs walked past this building many times thinking it was some kind of office complex before the sight of people’s washing hung up to dry let slip that it was housing).

 

Glass-panelled balconies especially are all the rage now, usually constructed with grey, unpainted metal frames, bonus points if you leave the bottom exposed in a dubious attempt at some kind of structural expressionism. Friendly-bombs is not a fan: the use of glass on the balconies has the effect of making them seem cold and brittle, you can imagine the whole lot shattering with a loud thunderclap; they also don’t seem appropriate for our blustery climate.

 

The use of glass in balconies, banisters and balustrades has a further, unnerving psychological affect, that of giving the impression that there is nothing there. So we have panels installed for safety which at first glance don’t appear to be there and thus offer no instinctive reassurance– you have to consciously remind yourself not only that the barrier is there but also that it is probably, probably, not going to break. Glass has never evoked strength and security in the popular mind, and perhaps it never should.

 

Here the identically-sized and spaced balconies, one per flat, face onto the psychotically busy Bath Road dual carriageway, providing probably not the best view or the healthiest air, but actually offering the passer-by a good look in at the occupants. This is because these glass balconies are also de facto windows, offering inadvertent glimpses of the life inside, particularly at night when the flats light up in a kind of snooper’s advent calendar.

 

There’s something slightly depressing about the little hints of humanity you can see in each balcony– a plastic chair for the Summer, kids’ toys, some potted plants, the ubiquitous washing drying in the car fumes– that has perhaps something to do with the uniformity of the flats and the meagreness of the personal space, and the realisation that here, amidst the rush-hour noise, clamour and pollution are people trying to quietly exist in modestly-accessorized lives (Thank goodness the nearby Salt Hill Park provides at least a partial escape). And the more the building you live in looks like the building you wage-slave in, the less comfort both occupant and passer-by gain from it.

 

Planning Permission Tricks #2: Whack-a-Mole Technique

 

 

Following from the last post we now look at another, similar way that developers alter their unpopular plans to give the illusion that concessions have been made. In this case we have the mind-bogglingly insensitive and worryingly foolish plan to build five staggeringly tall tower blocks in close proximity to each other over the Queensmere shopping centre (see this post for a depressing reminder of how this part of town has changed over the years). The initial plans were so ridiculous they seemed like a joke, and even Slough Borough Council, which is usually ready to green-light any hideous plan, complained about it, with councillors describing it variously as looking like “three UFOs” and a “mooning bottom”.

 

Like the aforementioned door-in-the-face technique, the planners had originally asked for a lot more– over 900 flats in total– but this had been reduced to over 670 in the early negotiations; again, the question should have been over whether the entire project was wise at all rather than the eventual number of flats. Then, at the stage of negotiation pictured above, they used the Whack-a-Mole technique: if complaints are raised about the height of your proposed towers, simply lower the tallest one while simultaneously raising the others, meaning that like the arcade game no sooner have you pushed one mole down in one place then another rises elsewhere. The first picture shows ‘before’, the second picture shows ‘after’: the plan has altered, but no great concession has been made, the project still takes up just as much space as it did before, and precious profit is conserved.

 

What you also see in the second picture is the new, utterly superfluous and face-palmingly ugly entrance to the Queensmere shopping centre; it seems the designers have augmented it either out of spite at having had to change their precious plans, or in an attempt to make the first tower seem less intimidating from the High Street by literally blocking all view of it. Like so much of Slough’s recent development it is grey, squared, featureless and cynical, playing perfectly into the expected image of Slough as a hopelessly mundane, soulless, functional business-home not worthy of warmth, wit, character or friendliness; these new developments fall on the Slough pedestrian like a boot on top of an ant, and are equally merciless. Its total lack of texture mirrors the grey paving slab desert before it (the refurbed Mackenzie “Square”) in a duet that adds to the cold, boring, unwelcoming feel of the New Slough. Councillors described this bit as looking like ‘silver duct tape stuck over the top of the towers’, but approved the plan anyway.

 

Planning Permission Tricks #1: Door-in-the-Face Technique

 

 

 

We’ve all familiar with door-in-the-face technique, in fact most of us will have employed it on our parents during childhood. You make a ridiculous demand, so extravagant that it would never be granted– maybe you ask for a wedge of cake an hour before dinner– and wait for it to be denied (“No, you’ll spoil your dinner.”). You then make a reduced, moderate demand (“Can I have a cookie instead?”) that now seems reasonable in comparison and is granted (“Okay, you can have a cookie.”) But of course, getting the cookie was your plan all along. Had you just asked for it outright the original refusal (“You’ll spoil your dinner”) would have been applied and you would have faced the unthinkable prospect of going a whole hour before dinner without extra sustenance. With this little bit of psychology you can sneak an outrageous proposal past the powers that be.

 

Developers seem to be using the same strategy. Over and over again we see examples of ridiculous plans being submitted, which scare the local authorities and are baulked at by the public, only for the developers to resubmit the plans in a slightly muted form that inevitably gets approved, even when the complaints of the original design still apply.

 

So we have the now-approved plans for three massive ‘urban villas’ (sound quaint? Well they ain’t) to be built down Windsor Road, replacing the row of low-rise early 20^th century housing that currently stands there. Initial plans caused outcry and opposition from local residents who objected to the sheer hulking size (some seven storeys) of the buildings, which are in close proximity to each other and threaten to further overcrowd the Central Ward, an already densely populated part of town. The resubmitted plans reduced the height of the project from seven to a maximum of six storeys (locals had wanted a four or five storey maximum); this was promptly approved by Slough Borough Council, who have been working with the builders Shanly Homes Ltd to buy up property along the road (then board it up and leave it derelict, of course) over the last few years.

 

Local residents still aren’t happy, with one being reported as saying this is the kind of infrastructure you see in “third-world countries where there are no planning regulations”. The architects meanwhile claim to have “listened”, while the Council nonchalantly walks away whistling. So an unwanted, unpopular proposal is rejected for a minimally softened version that appears to have given concessions but in reality hasn’t; the essential question, of whether this type of development is warranted here in the first place, goes unanswered. As in my example above, the question should not have been about the size of the snack but whether the kid should get one at all.

 

 

PS: This development headache was designed, once again, by bblur architecture, who with the ridiculous bus station and out-of-place Curve project seem to be hell-bent in using Slough as a kind of test-ground for insensitive structures that would be better off being banished to insensitive climates.

 

 

Mackenzie Street: Three Stages of Development– Past, Present & Future

 

 

Here we see three pictures taken from the same spot on Slough High Street, looking down Mackenzie Street. The first is from 1907, before the town’s major expansion with the Trading Estate; the second is how the view looks today, and the third is a CGI rendering of a development plan that Slough Borough Council have recently given the green light to. What is, what was, and what will be.

 

 

In the first picture we see all the charm of Edwardian Slough: wide, quite well-maintained streets, a variety of shop fronts and an ornate lamp-post that serves as a focal point between the two streets, evidenced by the chap leaning on the post next to it. Mackenzie Street extends away from the viewer with more shops and residential housing further on (the housing consisted of deep, triple-dickered Victorian buildings), and a healthy line of trees on both sides of the street. The street is wide despite this being before the age of the automobile– horse and trap was the preferred method of travel back then, as you can tell by what the horses have, er, left behind in the foreground. Overall, it’s a very open and uncluttered public street which retains a community feel thanks to the nearby residential houses, differing housing stock and the familiar charm of the greenery.

 

In the second picture, we fast-forward to today. As you can see, the street has completely disappeared. This is because it was entirely demolished in the mid-1960s and built over by a large shopping centre (called Queensmere, in yet another sycophantic attempt to claim kinship with the nearby royal residence of Windsor). The street is no more, and all that’s left is this small, grey-paved space in front of the centre entrance, optimistically called ‘Mackenzie Square’. The residential houses are gone, consolidating the town centre’s purpose as being purely for retail; gone too is that sense of community and identity (and also some prime real estate– if housing still existed in this central location today, it would be worth a fortune). Now there is only commerce, and a once public street has become a private operation, open only for business and closed entirely to the elements.

 

The only texture is that of hard, cold grey surfaces. Chilly metal poles provide the lighting and the ever-present cctv surveillance, and there are no trees, or indeed any greenery at all. Benches have been added, but they are of the unfriendly backless kind, metal poles and wooden slats suspended between monolithic blocks– boldly designed but cold and uncomfortable to sit on. Backless benches usually indicate to me a tacit admission that sitters aren’t welcome, like the seats in certain fast food restaurants that are designed to be uncomfortable so that you don’t linger too long on them. Overall, this feels like a resented public space, one that has been designed without warmth or softness specifically to dissuade people from stopping there. Imagine a broad leafy tree, with comfortable wooden benches in its shade and a gravelled patch around its base, serving as a focal point for the shopper to pause, rest or socialise; then open your eyes and wonder where all the optimism went. Still, at least the sky looks good.

 

Oops, spoke too soon! In the third picture we see the CGI wet-dream of what is to come, stretching to the heavens. Plans have now been approved to build five massive towers (with at least one having more than twenty storeys) in close proximity to each other and essentially on top of the Queensmere shopping centre. Residential space has returned, but in the worst possible way.

 

Slough property prices have skyrocketed in recent years as the town struggles with a housing shortage (a la the whole country), and so developers are keen to cash in by building as many properties as possible in the lucrative town centre (see these examples, for measure). Their recent mantra has been to pack in as many of these new apartments as they can into high-density, high-rise buildings; in the case of these five monstrosities, they are being dropped into what is already the most densely populated part of the town. With the busy dual-carriageway of Wellington Street being directly behind them, the shopping centre beneath and the High Street in front, humble little Mackenzie ‘Square’, a few square yards of Victorian repose, becomes practically the only public space around for these new buildings. With over six hundred new flats proposed and potentially a couple of thousand new occupants, they may need to fit in a few more benches.

 

PS: You will also notice in the plans a superfluously enlarged entrance to the shopping centre, designed presumably to obscure as much of the dismaying sight behind it as possible.