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.