A Walk Around the New Developments on Railway Terrace, Part 1

 

 

New developments along Railway Terrace, central Slough

 

Panoramic view of the new developments behind Slough station. The complex on the left was built by Barratt Homes and is made up of one and two-bedroom flats. The tall grey block and the smaller one next to it, built by Metropolis Apartments a few years ago, consist of commuter-bait apartments for leasehold sale or rent that are sky-high in price as well as elevation (there’s a two-bed flat currently listed online for £290k, if you’re interested).

 

It’s Xanadu converted to flats for dozens of mini metropolitan commuter Citizen Kanes. It is the kind of deliberately un-subtle display of ostentation and flaunted status that’s usually at home in the Gulf, and when placed in Slough becomes an uncomfortable and inescapable reminder of the dividing process that is happening in the town: the separation of the moneyed, upwardly-mobile city-job commuter class away from the lower-paid, socially-stuck and stagnantly-mobile oiks that make up the bulk of Slough’s population.

 

One thing is obvious: it is for this affluent class that Slough’s ‘reinvention’ is being designed. The council’s obsession with attracting young, tech-savvy, business jargon-spouting upwardly-mobile iPad-eating airheads to the town, with suitably crass, unsympathetic (but “modern”, of course) developments dangled as a kind of down-lighted, laminate-floored, glass and steel carrot to lure them in, shows the town leaders’ dismissal of the ordinary subjects of Slough. The council’s aim is not to improve the Slough that exists, but to attract new, richer (read “better”) people to the town in the hope that everyone else will obligingly fuck off, and the town will be bettered by default.

 

 

‘Lexington’ apartment building, Railway Terrace

 

And so the revived trend of high-rise, high density building reaches its ultimate expression, literally reaching its most excessive peak. At 15 storeys (not counting the observation projection at the top) this is Slough’s tallest and most terrifying new building, a little bit of Dubai in East Berkshire. With its combination of staggered, asymmetric peak, grey, slate-like finish, steep drops and sheer bloody size it is the very definition of a ‘mountain-block’, a term created by this blog to describe the new species of development that we’ve seen cropping up in Slough lately; genealogically, it is the bloated grandchild of the 1960s’ experiments with high-rise-- modern residential development exposed to cosmic radiation and mutated to gargantuan size, like a battery chicken pumped full of growth hormones. It’s a block of flats on steroids.

 

The image is complete when gulls and crows, reduced to specks by the distance, sweep around its summit, giving it the look of a modern, mechanised, haunted castle on a hill, a bit like something out of a Tim Burton film. Parked amongst a skyline of similar buildings it would fit right in, but here it’s as out of place as an iceberg; if it were half the size maybe, it would still be large but would be perhaps forgivable. ‘The sky is the limit’, it proudly proclaims on the building’s brochure, a mantra the architect has taken all too literally.

 

 

‘Lexington’ apartment building, as seen from Platform 4, Slough station

 

Unlike its social housing forebears, the modern high-rise has been reinvented for the affluent. With its flats commanding eye-watering prices, and with the South-East’s housing shortage and hysteria over the supposed boon of the coming Crossrail project (an imminent plan to augment the rail links to London) pushing them up even further, it’s little wonder the project was built so large: every storey means lots and lots of extra cash. It was cynically built right up against the station in an obvious attempt to attract affluent city commuters, whose dull, Apprentice-watching minds would then be able to make the astounding cognitive leap that if…you…live…here…then..you..can..go..to..the..station…there… Meanwhile, Slough’s housing problems persist unperturbed, despite the sheer size of such developments.

 

It looms arrogantly over Slough’s historic railway station building, which is now sadly lost to the sheer number of hulking brutes that have been built all around it, all trying to cash in on the fact that if the station’s just there, then it’s only twenty minutes to London, and if you close your eyes really hard you can pretend that it is London. But this attitude does nothing for the town in the long run, as despite its proximity to the capital Slough is not a suburb.

 

 

 

New multi-storey residential housing complex on Windsor Rd, on the corner of Chalvey Rd East– great if you love living by a main road! This was one of the first of a new generation of ‘mountain blocks’ that has been built in Slough in a hurried answer to its housing shortage: massive, looming, multi-storey buildings characterised by minimal variation in unit style, rather hostile looking steel balconies that do not offer much space, unimaginative and unvariating window size and distribution, minimal breathing space for the pedestrian passer-by and a general lack of warmth in design. The accusation of it being a 'tower block’ has been averted by the use of asymmetry, which in the above case saves the building from being too foreboding; however, its sheer bulk, particularly in relation to other buildings nearby, makes it unwelcomingly imposing– certainly it dominates the view looking up Windsor Rd from lower down the hill. Some effort has at least been made to incorporate the shape of the rounded corner, and the retention of trees of varying types provides a bit of a fig-leaf, although with the building’s sheer size they look more like shrubs outside a house. The end result is more mountain range than building, with the effect of dwarfing and barricading the neighbour, whose local skyline it now defines.   

Previously the site was occupied by a fairly stately if rather drab Victorian building called Denmark House, which in later years was used for offices by the District Council. The corner was also likely the location for the Arbour Hill Pond, which was used as a watering-spot for horses on their way through to what was then the sleepy village of Chalvey. As you can see the curved Victorian wall around the perimeter still remains, possibly rebuilt in stretches, but with the original character retained.