Large parts of a UK town with a big celebrity link have become a wasteland – with one explorer laying some of the on one of the biggest Tesco in Europe nearby.
Slough is perhaps best known for its association with hit comedy The Office and it also has posh neighbours like Windsor Castle and Eton College. But the town, about an hour outside London, has lost most of its history through a relentless programme of redevelopment.
Urban explorer David Burnip visited the town centre, taking in a desolate shopping centre and a high street lined with bookies and charity shops. “Even the Greggs is closed, you don’t normally see a Greggs closing down,” he said.
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Other big name casualties include the Slough branch of Wilkos, after the hardware and furnishings giant went into administration in August this year, and a huge, and now deserted, Debenhams store. "Is this place even worth fixing?" he asked.
David walked the length of the high street, taking in the almost unbroken chain of betting shops and phone cracking stores. "It's pretty much entirely takeaways, bookies, Cash Converters … there’s so many different food shops on there it's crazy,” he explained.
While Covid has taken its toll on Slough's high street like many others across the UK, David puts some of the blame on the monster Tesco Express nearby. There, customers can take out a phone contract, grab some sushi and even get their hair cut alongside their weekly shop.
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“You don't need to go to the High Street when stuff like this exists,” David said. “You can get your photos printed, you got your pharmacy, got your opticians – they’ve got everything in here.”
The local shopping mall, too, is a desolate wasteland of boarded-up shopfronts – with only a few businesses huddled together at one end. The centre's security guard took exception to David filming the empty shops, for some reason, and sent him back out onto the high street.
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When Slough's Tesco megastore opened in 2010, local Councillor Shafiq Chaudhry predicted that it would benefit other retailers. "In the beginning, there was a bit of concern that opening a new supermarket a few yards away would affect businesses," he said. "People like to have different stores, that means more competition, which is good.”
David had visited Slough, which was made world-famous after the success of Ricky Gervais’s smash hit sitcom The Office, to show that the phenomenon of hollowed-out high streets isn’t just confined to the north of England.
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He explained: “I’m fed up of people saying ‘Oh look how bad those northern towns are.’ I know this isn’t just a northern problem so we're down in Slough.”
David said that, wherever he goes, he always tries to present a balanced picture, and pick out a few positive notes alongside the portrayals of our dying high streets. But all the locals ha had spoken to had simply said “Slough is s***".
“I don't think anyone has been positive about the place at all,” he added. “From shops I have gone into from people I’m chatting to – nobody has been positive about it."
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He highlighted the ambitious space age bus station, which appears to have been severely damaged by fire, and the numerous sites demolished for redevelopment that don’t appear to have any new building work going on.
The blight of clumsy redevelopment is nothing new. In 1937, poet Sir John Betjeman wrote of “friendly bombs” raining on Slough to wipe out the then-new trading estate that he saw as the beginning of a new, soulless Britain.
But David’s series of videos chronicling the death of the Great British High Street shows that there’s a new, and even bigger change taking place in our towns and cities today. Where it will all end is hard to predict.
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