Slough Trading Estate
Encyclopedia
Slough
Slough is a borough and unitary authority within the ceremonial county of Royal Berkshire, England. The town straddles the A4 Bath Road and the Great Western Main Line, west of central London...
, Berkshire
Berkshire
Berkshire is a historic county in the South of England. It is also often referred to as the Royal County of Berkshire because of the presence of the royal residence of Windsor Castle in the county; this usage, which dates to the 19th century at least, was recognised by the Queen in 1957, and...
in 1920, was an early business park
Industrial park
An industrial park is an area zoned and planned for the purpose of industrial development...
in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. According to the estate's owners and operators, SEGRO (formerly Slough Estates plc), Slough Trading Estate consists of 486 acres (2 km²) of commercial property in Slough and provides 7500000 sq ft (696,772.8 m²) of accommodation to 500 businesses and has a working population of about 20,000 people. Slough Trading Estate is the largest industrial estate in single private ownership in Europe. There are over 600 buildings. The Estate is home to 400 tenants from countries including America, Italy, Japan, Germany and Korea supporting 20,000 jobs. Companies using the park include Centrica
Centrica
Centrica plc is a multinational utility company, based in the United Kingdom but also with interests in North America. Centrica is the largest supplier of gas to domestic customers in the UK, and one of the largest suppliers of electricity, operating under the trading names "Scottish Gas" in...
plc, Yell
Yell Group
Yell Group plc is a multinational directories company headquartered in Reading, United Kingdom. As well as the United Kingdom, it has operations in the United States, Spain and some countries in Latin America...
, Electrolux
Electrolux
The Electrolux Group is a Swedish appliance maker.As of 2010 the 2nd largest home appliance manufacturer in the world after Whirlpool, its products sell under a variety of brand names including its own and are primarily major appliances and vacuum cleaners...
, GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline plc is a global pharmaceutical, biologics, vaccines and consumer healthcare company headquartered in London, United Kingdom...
, Mars Confectionery
Mars, Incorporated
Mars, Incorporated is a worldwide manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products with US$30 billion in annual sales in 2010, and is ranked as the 5th largest privately held company in the United States by Forbes. Headquartered in McLean, unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia,...
, ICI
Imperial Chemical Industries
Imperial Chemical Industries was a British chemical company, taken over by AkzoNobel, a Dutch conglomerate, one of the largest chemical producers in the world. In its heyday, ICI was the largest manufacturing company in the British Empire, and commonly regarded as a "bellwether of the British...
Paints, the datacentre operator Network-i
Network-i
Network-i Ltd is a managed services company headquartered in Slough, Berkshire, England. The company owns and operates an international private network designed to exclusively carry videoconferencing traffic....
, OKI Printing Solutions
Oki Electric Industry
, commonly referred to as OKI, OKI Electric or the OKI Group, is a Japanese company manufacturing and selling info-telecom and printer products. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, OKI operates in over 120 countries around the world....
, and Sara Lee. It is also home to important small, medium and large businesses.
The estate’s power station supplies heat and power to the entire industrial site.
Langley Business Park and Langley Business Centre are other thriving business estates in Slough, with other companies, industries and enterprises found throughout the borough.
History
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....
) and adjacent to the Great Western Railway
Great Western Railway
The Great Western Railway was a British railway company that linked London with the south-west and west of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament in 1835 and ran its first trains in 1838...
main line, mainly forming part of Cippenham
Cippenham
Cippenham is a suburb of the unitary authority of Slough in the county of Berkshire, England. It was transferred to Berkshire from Buckinghamshire in 1974.The name, Cippenham derives from the old English Cippan-ham, meaning Cippa's homestead....
Court Farm but also including the site of an isolation hospital, was bought by the government to form a motor repair depot for army transport. The depot was intended to receive broken down vehicles by train from the battlefront, repair them, and return them to service.
The project was not regarded as a success. The depot was believed to be so urgent that construction work (eventually by construction company Sir Robert McAlpine
Sir Robert McAlpine
Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd. is a private British company headquartered in London. It carries out engineering and construction for the oil and gas, petrochemical, power generation, nuclear, pharmaceutical, defence, chemical, water and mining industries.-History:...
) began in July 1918 without harvesting the crops on the land, but the site was still under construction when the armistice was agreed in November 1918.
Although the depot's fundamental purpose went with the end of the war, General Jan Smuts
Jan Smuts
Jan Christiaan Smuts, OM, CH, ED, KC, FRS, PC was a prominent South African and British Commonwealth statesman, military leader and philosopher. In addition to holding various cabinet posts, he served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924 and from 1939 until 1948...
proposed a post war use for the depot which was implemented. Rather than scrapping the many army surplus vehicles, they were sent to Slough for repair prior to sale. Because of this use, for many years (until at least the 1980s), the site was known locally and colloquially as 'the dump', and at the time of the depot's development it was also known as 'The White Elephant'. Relations between management and workforce were so poor that at one point the entire workforce was sacked.
In April 1920, the Government Surplus Disposal Board sold the 2.7 square kilometre (600 acre) site and its contents (17,000 used cars, trucks and motorcycles, and 170,000 square metres (1.8 million sq ft) of covered workshops) for over seven million pounds. Sir Percival Perry
Percival Perry, 1st Baron Perry
Percival Lea Dewhurst Perry, 1st Baron Perry KBE , English motor vehicle manufacturer, was chairman of Ford Motor Company Limited for 20 years from its incorporation in 1928 completing almost a lifetime's work with Henry Ford...
, who had effectively established the British operations of the Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company is an American multinational automaker based in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The automaker was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. In addition to the Ford and Lincoln brands, Ford also owns a small stake in Mazda in Japan and Aston Martin in the UK...
and who had been appointed Assistant Controller of the UK government's Agricultural Machinery Department during the war, and Sir Noel Mobbs
Noel Mobbs
Sir Arthur Noel Mobbs KCVO, OBE was the founder of Slough Estates, one of the United Kingdom's largest property businesses.-Career:...
, led the group of investors who acquired the depot, establishing the Slough Trading Co. Ltd.
Repair and sale of ex-army vehicles continued until 1925 when the Slough Trading Company Act was passed allowing the company (renamed Slough Estates Ltd
Slough Estates Ltd
SEGRO plc is a property investment and development company. It develops and invests in property located in the UK, Continental Europe and the USA focusing on edge of town flexible business space. The firm switched to Real Estate Investment Trust status when REITs were introduced in the United...
) to establish an Industrial Estate
Industrial park
An industrial park is an area zoned and planned for the purpose of industrial development...
. The existing army buildings were tenanted as factories, and additional units were built. Those on the Bath Road and Farnham Road frontages were designed with fundamentally uniform simple Art Deco
Art Deco
Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...
offices on the front. Shared facilities were provided for workforce and employers, including a fire station, restaurant, shops and banks, a large community centre
Community centre
Community centres or community centers or jumping recreation centers are public locations where members of a community tend to gather for group activities, social support, public information, and other purposes. They may sometimes be open for the whole community or for a specialised group within...
(1937) and the Slough Industrial Health Service (1947).
Early businesses established on the trading estate included Citroën
Citroën
Citroën is a major French automobile manufacturer, part of the PSA Peugeot Citroën group.Founded in 1919 by French industrialist André-Gustave Citroën , Citroën was the first mass-production car company outside the USA and pioneered the modern concept of creating a sales and services network that...
(1926), Gillette
Global Gillette
Gillette is a brand of Procter & Gamble currently used for safety razors, among other personal care products. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, it was one of several brands originally owned by The Gillette Company, a leading global supplier of products under various brands, which was...
, Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson is an American multinational pharmaceutical, medical devices and consumer packaged goods manufacturer founded in 1886. Its common stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the company is listed among the Fortune 500....
and High Duty Alloys. In 1932, they were joined by Mars Ltd
Mars, Incorporated
Mars, Incorporated is a worldwide manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products with US$30 billion in annual sales in 2010, and is ranked as the 5th largest privately held company in the United States by Forbes. Headquartered in McLean, unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia,...
and Berlei (UK) Limited
Berlei
Berlei is a brand of women's lingerie and in particular bras and girdles.-History:The brand originated in Australia in 1917. Berlei undergarments are now sold in Australia by Pacific Brands and in the United Kingdom by Courtaulds Textiles....
. In late 1933 the Slough Estates Journal reported there were 'more than 150 companies' based on the estate.
As the Trading Estate grew despite the depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
of the 1920s and 1930s, people were attracted from all over the country to come and find work in Slough. But the fast increase in population resulted in a shortage of housing.
One solution was the construction of Timbertown, an estate of wooden single storey houses built adjacent to the site occupied by the Community Centre and now occupied by Herschel Grammar School
Herschel Grammar School
Herschel Grammar School is a selective co-educational grammar foundation school and Technology College in Slough, Berkshire. The current headteacher is Mrs Joanne Rockall...
.
From the outside, the houses looked like an army barracks, but inside they were spacious and comfortable - with 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, a big kitchen and a living room. At the start, Timbertown was well cared for a popular community, with a shop, social hut and even a Sunday school. But the buildings soon started to deteriorate. The wooden houses had never been intended to be permanent and Timbertown was finally demolished in the 1930s to make way for new buildings.
Until 1973, the estate had a railway directly linking the factories to Britain's railway system. A passenger service ran from Paddington and Slough station
Slough railway station
Slough railway station, in Slough, Berkshire, England, is served by local services operated by First Great Western from to and intercity services on the Great Western Main Line, the original line of the Great Western Railway...
s to a separate station (accessed by a spur from the main line, separate from the freight access to the estate), until 1956.
In January 2008, the estate's power station
Power station
A power station is an industrial facility for the generation of electric energy....
was sold to Scottish and Southern Energy.
In popular culture
In 1937, English poet John BetjemanJohn Betjeman
Sir John Betjeman, CBE was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack".He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture...
wrote his poem Slough
Slough (Poem)
"Slough" is a ten-stanza poem by Sir John Betjeman, first published in the 1937 collection Continual Dew. It was written in protest against 850 factories that were to be built in the English town of Slough. The poem caused an uproar when first published....
in protest against the expansion of the Slough Trading Estate. The poem bemoans the loss of the area's rural character, and pillories English society's increasing consumerism and the sweatshop conditions caused by large-scale industrial development.
The Ricky Gervais
Ricky Gervais
Ricky Dene Gervais is an English comedian, actor, director, radio presenter, producer, musician, and writer.Gervais achieved mainstream fame with his television series The Office and the subsequent series Extras, both of which he co-wrote and co-directed with friend and frequent collaborator...
/Stephen Merchant
Stephen Merchant
Stephen James Merchant is an English writer, director, radio presenter, comedian, and actor. He is best known for his collaborations with Ricky Gervais, as the co-writer and co-director of the popular British sitcom The Office, as the co-writer, co-director and a co-star of Extras, and as the...
comedy The Office
The Office (UK TV series)
The Office is a British sitcom television series that was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on 9 July 2001. Created, written, and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the programme is about the day-to-day lives of office employees in the Slough branch of the fictitious...
is set on Slough Trading Estate. The opening sequence shows several locations in Slough and the Crossbow House building on the Trading Estate where fictional paper merchants Wernham Hogg are supposedly located.
See also
- SEGRO (formerly Slough Estates Ltd/plc)
- Industrial parkIndustrial parkAn industrial park is an area zoned and planned for the purpose of industrial development...
- Industrial estate
External links
- Slough Trading Estate Accessed December 31, 2006
- SEGRO Official Website