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 Old Upton, Part 2

 

 

 

Victoria Street

 

As the name would suggest, this is a Victorian street that still retains houses of that era on one side (the other side consists of newer buildings and previously cleared, un-redeveloped land). This is what much of Slough, particularly the central part, looked like up until the 1960s, when the town lost most of its Victorian character in a frenzy of demolition and dubious redevelopment that saw Slough lose many fine old buildings, including William Herschel’s historic Observatory House (philistines!). Consequently the town centre lost its overall Victorian identity and has wandered along without much of a defining character ever since, with merciless and uncherishable new developments sitting awkwardly alongside the remains of yesteryear in ever more awkward juxtapositions.

 

This erasure of Slough’s history and tradition is one of the reasons the place feels so lost culturally, an identity-vacancy that was filled by stereotypes of dull offices and boring warehouses simply because there were now more of those than anything else, so that’s what came to define the whole town. Overall, a lack of reverence for the heritage of the past has extended to a lack of consideration for the present; the reigning mantra, that Slough doesn’t really deserve nice things simply because it’s uurgh, “Slough” (from the old English, “a place of mire”), is part of the mindset that has developed Slough to be functional but not charming, industrially impressive but soulless, glass and steel but no warm vernacular materials. It’s like getting a new toothbrush for Christmas: Yeah sure, you’ll eventually need one, but you can’t help feeling like you’ve been gypped.

 

 

Alpha Street South

 

A terrace of petite early Victorian houses on the West side of Alpha Street South, of what the local historian Maxwell Fraser described as “plain but pleasing proportions”, although this row was built early enough to have not been “disfigured by bow windows” (that craze arriving in the later Victorian period). Without the bow window projections the front doors pretty much open straight out onto the pavement, with the stumpy little walls being added in later years to provide a miniscule buffer to the prying eyes of the street; there isn’t even enough room for the usual porch addition.

 

If these front garden proportions seem stingy and ungenerous today, remember that when these houses were built there was literally nothing but open fields surrounding them. In a description of Slough in 1830, a local Victorian writer recalled that “A little beyond where Alpha St now is was the stile from the Church path, all fields then to the end of the lane belonging to Upton farm”. Stiles, farms, fields? Seems unthinkable when you look around the area today. Light, space, traffic and overdevelopment were certainly not issues then. And yet the era wasn’t faultless– even with all that space and possibility, houses for workers were still tiny, and in many cases such as these, crushed together in a ruthless economy of space; moving in when they were first built would have felt like sitting next to the only other person in the cinema. Er, awkward!