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.

 

 

A Walk Around Slough Library

 

 

 

Slough Public Library

 

Formerly known as the Robert Taylor Library after a former Mayor of Slough, this building opened in 1974. It is one of Slough’s better buildings. It was designed by Fred Pooley, the county architect, in a style that you could probably call 'brutalism lite' if it were edible. At first glance it seems rather imposing, particularly the top floor with its narrow prison-esque windows and its overall grey daytime colour scheme, but on further inspection you can see that it is actually a balance of glass and concrete, with the bottom floor being almost all glass. At night, with the interior lit, it takes on a different character, even if during the day (and with that ominous CCTV camera perched on the corner) it carries a slight whiff of state totalitarianism.

 

As a public edifice, this imposing, forceful appearance gives the building a robust, stately feel that is reassuring when you realise that it is a free-to-enter public space that is yours to use. Brutalism worked best  in applications like these– solid, impassive arms of the state that were actually at the service of the little man, which is why so many libraries and cultural centres of the mid century used the style rather than simply reverting to anachronisms or historical kitsch.

 

Once upon a time both sides of this corner were filled with tall, terraced Victorian shops, similar to some of the older surviving stretches of the High Street; these were all knocked down in the 60s during a period of intensive development that would change Slough town centre completely. In this case, the addition of such a well-positioned and easily recognized major public building shows that the era was not without some merit.

 

 

Following from the last post, we see the mildly Brutalist 1974 Slough Library building taking on a different character in the dark evening. For a start we can see that there’s a lot more glass involved in the design than you notice in the daytime; bright, warm colour shines out from inside, the imposing concrete façade is lost to the gloom and you essentially see the inverse of the daytime building. The large ‘slabs’ on the mid-section prevent the design from being too voyeuristic, allowing for a little seclusion and privacy for those inside, while the glass sections offer tantalising glimpses of the warm, inviting interior, particularly the wooden-framed high ceiling of the middle floor. Even the little ‘prison’ windows on the top floor now seem to provide intriguing, Edward Hopper-esque views of what’s going on inside. See, the vibrant, naughty night-time side of Brutalism!

 

 

A final look at Slough Library. Close up, it appears more intricate than at first glance, and from this angle we can see the symmetry around the corners– all four sides follow the same pattern, with the current entrance being a low-key affair on the left-hand side (in the past it had multiple entrances open).

 

Sadly (and this is getting to be a common theme of this blog), this really will be a ‘final’ look at Slough Library: this useful building has fallen foul of the idle hands of Slough Borough Council, who have built a £22 million eyesore just opposite called ‘The Curve’, which is to bung various public facilities together including the library service. Nevermore will this excellent public space be used for study and enlightenment– from the various plans, it seems that it will be refashioned as a combination of retail and hotel space, and it doesn’t seem certain whether the building itself will stay. Even if this good example of a much-denigrated architectural style does survive the bulldozers, it will still be another instance of a dedicated and generous public space being commercialized, with the inner space, designed to be an optimistic centre of knowledge and open-mindedness, being purloined to sell you stuff, more stuff, paninis and coffees, mobile phone covers and cheap headphones, glued-together shoes and jewellery made of plastic, quack medicines and cheaper car insurance, and all the other tacky things that we’re supposed to dedicate our lives to collecting.