I’m tired of people bashing Britain’s ‘most miserable town’

From time to time, it is a burden having grown up in Slough.

According to a new “happiness survey” (whatever that is) – it is the “most miserable place to live in Britain”. Even the word is depressing – it means swamp. Which is what it was, in primordial days. Some say it still is...

My old school, Slough Grammar, was so keen to hide the word, the association for former pupils was grandly titled “Old Paludians”. Presumably they thought it sounded less naff than “Old Sloughians” (anyone fancy being a sluffian?). But it is a con: “Paluds” is Latin for – you guessed it – a slough or bog.

Regardless of what Rightmove, who carried out the survey, may say (and since when was a property website an arbiter of public opinion?), I am wearily familiar with attempts to malign Slough, going back decades.

I am proud of my association with the town, but get annoyed at moments like now – when all the tired old Slough bashing tropes are wheeled out.

Slough basher-in-chief in absentia is a poet: the late Sir John Betjeman. The town can never escape the cruel shadow of his 1937 poem, “Slough”, with its damning opening lines: “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now.”

Ouch.

It may be poetry – but it’s rank snobbery, too, with sneering references to “balding young clerks, stinking cads, bogus Tudor bars” and women who “frizz out their peroxide hair”... woke, it isn’t.

Back in the 1970s, after leaving school, I got a job as a cub reporter with a local Slough newspaper. Inevitably, at some point a story appeared in the national media slagging off Slough for some reason or another.

I was instructed to follow up the story by finding a “local angle” – which is how I found myself talking on the phone to Sir John himself, aged around 70 and who had just been made poet laureate, about his poem.

It went like this: “Hello Sir John, I am a reporter with the Slough Evening Mail and we wondered whether you would like to accompany us on an open-top bus tour of Slough to try to show you it is not all bad, as your poem suggests, and might be worth saving from the bombs.”

Sir John replied: “No, thank you. Goodbye.” And that was it.

It is not all Betjeman’s fault. Ricky Gervais’ TV drama The Office, about a miserable company with a miserable overbearing manager, David Brent, was set in Slough. And the TV series about “Slough House” – an office in London, not Slough, where washed up spies are sent – is called Slow Horses. Geddit?

Now, I am not going to waste my time listing all Slough’s qualities: five excellent state grammar schools (including my old one, predictably rebranded as Upton Grammar); the glorious Windsor Castle, Windsor Great Park, historic Eton and the River Thames a stone’s throw away; unbeatable transport links including the new Elizabeth Line train service direct to London’s West End and the City; the M4, M25 and nearby Heathrow airport; five Premiership football clubs within an hour’s reach, plus the vast Slough Trading Estate with plenty of jobs – all on the doorstep.

How many other towns can boast of such advantages? None that I know of.

It is true that it has its fair share of social problems, including crime and poverty. Yet while I have no grounds to challenge the accuracy of the “most miserable town” survey, I do have my own personal (albeit anecdotal) evidence, past and present, that it is not the misery guts epicentre of Britain, as alleged.

My memories – and those of many contemporaries: of going to school, working and living there – are universally happy.

I do not live in Slough now (and yes, it has changed) but during Covid I volunteered at the town’s Salt Hill Park vaccination centre, where everyone was charming and fun. I also accompanied a musician friend, Mike, not long ago when he busked in the town’s Queensmere shopping centre.

Despite visibly being less well off than those in more fashionable neighbouring towns where he also plies his trade, the Slough shoppers dug deeper into their pockets to throw cash into his hat. Most smiled, a few sang along, one or two danced. There was human happiness, not misery, on show in Slough that day – and lots of it.

Our band played a gig at the Wheatsheaf pub in the backstreets of the town around the same time. It was a riot (in a good way).

It is time to rework Betjeman’s malodorous ode: “Come friendly bombs, leave Slough alone. To many folk, it’s home sweet home...”