A Walk Around Derelict Chalvey 

 

 

Abandoned shopping complex, Chalvey, Slough.

 

Virtually all the businesses have left this now derelict shopping complex, although a few diehards remain. Like a Wild West set at high noon, old leaves and bits of paper blow around in lonely wind vortices, and you can’t help but predictably hum the first few bars of the Specials’ song Ghost Town. The space is utterly deserted, as no man or creature has any business going there, with only the tumble-trash to remind you that civilisation hasn’t ended. As a result, the area has become totally obsolete as public space.

The faded blue and pink posts, the multi-coloured shopfronts– there was at least once an attempt to introduce some vibrancy to this part of Slough, some optimistic small-business dream, but it has not proved lasting; why, Slough is the home for big business, multinational household brands operating from the trading estate, smartly dressed companies that hire office space by the tens of thousands of cubed feet, not modest local efforts squatting in brown-brick units in Chalvey. At some point this complex will be ‘regenerated’ by the powers that be, but whether the public space and small-business retail provision will survive in the blueprints remains to be seen. 

 

 

 

 

 

Derelict Jackson & Nephew petrol station, Chalvey Rd East, 2014.

 

Nature reclaims unused urban space, poking through the seams in the asphalt, growing up the walls, pooping on the forecourt. This site was last operated by Shell, but has been unused for nearly a decade. Jackson and Nephew had been on the site since the early 30s, initially as a cycle repair business and later as sellers of petrol; in 1979 the old shop was pulled down and this petrol station put in its place. The sign still shows the old 5-digit telephone number.   

In the background stands Tower House, one of the relatively few high-rise blocks in Slough. Both the block and the petrol station site are earmarked for ‘regeneration’, with the latter having been surrounded by new building hoarding just this week. This view will soon change, both far and near.