A Walk Around the Wellesley Road Estate

 

 

View down Wellesley Road, looking West

 

Here we see the beginnings of the grim process by which Slough became so charmless a town to look at. The houses in this stretch of Wellesley Road were built between 1927 and 1928 by a builder who would go on to build identically-dull roads immediately afterwards in the Baylis area of Slough. The terrace is seemingly unending, with all the houses identical in size and design– no variation at all. Greenery is pretty much non-existent, a far cry from the fields and allotments that stretched here when the road was laid. But the rapidly expanding Slough of the 20s needed houses, and after the council had advertised the land for a couple of years a Mr Henry Heath took the chance to build an estate of over a hundred houses on this road and the adjoining Richmond Crescent.

 

By all accounts they were snapped up fairly quickly at the time and had an average of four occupants in each house. Some people had already moved in before the road was even finished, and the Slough Observer of the time reports the disgruntlement of locals over the state of the road, which had been churned into Flanders-esque mud by construction vehicles including an “exceptionally heavy traction engine with four trucks, each fully laden, which passes over the road three or four times a day”. Complaints were also made about the street being poorly lit at night, with the empty houses being a convenient place for “the criminally-intent to lie in wait for victims”. The council couldn’t do much about it however, as at the time this was a private road, and therefore not under their jurisdiction. Whoever said only council houses were dull?

 

 

A closer look at some of the houses along Wellesley Road.

 

This small estate of speculative housing, designed and built for working-class owners, was built in 1927 and is a repetition of the exact same design over and over again in a terrace. The slightly jerry-built-looking design is essentially that of a stripped-down Victorian terrace (but without the charm)– no front gables or dormers, continuous pitched roof punctuated by chimneys, stingy front garden ‘guarded’ by a stout brick wall, barely-adorned entrance and bay window at the front, except here the bay window has become a cynical, squared, cheap-looking addition, added to impress the lower class buyer while costing the builder the absolute minimum in design and construction costs. Certainly the awkward, knobbled, filth-collecting little ‘eaves’ above the window-panes haven’t lasted particularly well. But such is the mystical power of the bay-window: it would continue to impress punters and denote class aspirations for at least another couple of decades.

 

Unlike its bare-brick Victorian forebears, this terrace has been finished in rough, uneven pebbledash from head to toe– a worrying sign for an estate that was completed suspiciously quickly, as this was often a way of concealing shoddy brickwork underneath. The individual houses are quite small, another characteristic of speculative building at the time– although twenties’ house design was informed by a set of recommended standards (published by government in the Tudor Walters Report of 1919) what increasingly happened was the preferred layout of the houses was adopted while the overall size was reduced– little houses for little people. In this case however, the size and plan appears to have been unchanged from the concise proportions of the Victorian terrace (Report? What report?!). However, even these modest terraces would have been new once, and were no doubt cherished by that first slightly-upwardly-mobile generation; alas, time has decidedly worn the novelty off.

 

 

Looking East down Richmond Crescent

 

Following on from the last two posts, we find the same style of housing mercilessly replicated in Richmond Crescent, part of the Wellesley Road estate built in the late 20s. Readers who thought I was being a little harsh on this housing will start to see why; copy-n-pasted over and over again, any style of housing will start to get tedious. 

 

We can also see the impact of that other enemy of urban aesthetics– the car. When this crescent was built, who would have envisioned a time when most houses would have a car (and in many cases two or three)? Their most damaging effect on residential areas, other than cluttering the street, has been the complete eradication of the front garden, that stalwart of British domicile design. All trace of greenery and garden has been concreted over giving the street a joyless, functual feel that makes for an uninspiring environment. Looking for nature has become like a game of ‘Where’s Wally?’–nothing, nothing, nothing, wait there he is! Hiding behind those wheelie bins on the left!

 

As a result of the automobile invasion, the entire visual public and private space, between one row of houses and the other, is dominated and designed purely for cars. It even feels weird walking down streets like these, as the pedestrian pavement has been similarly taken over by the auto-bots; it is guaranteed that at some point you will have to dart out of the way of a car blindly backing out or turning in. Poorly-aged estates like this are visually cynical; whatever pride and personality your home and neighbourhood has takes place indoors– outside is just for parking.