Tour Audio a Slough

In 1937, the poet John Betjeman published a poem beginning 'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn't fit for humans now.' The town has been arguing with that assessment ever since. Slough is Berkshire's largest town, positioned just west of London at the mouth of the M4, and it has spent decades being treated as the poster child for postwar planning gone wrong, for trading estates and retail parks, for everything that the English middle classes preferred to look away from. The BBC series The Office, set in a Slough paper company, made it synonymous with mundane desperation. David Brent is not a flattering mascot.

Against this, there are facts that the dismissive commentary tends to omit.

William Herschel, the German-born astronomer, moved to Slough in 1786 and here discovered Uranus in 1781 (while still at Bath) before building a 12-meter telescope in the garden of Observatory House on what is now Windsor Road. He and his sister Caroline discovered numerous deep sky objects from Slough, work that fundamentally advanced human understanding of the cosmos. The Herschel connection is commemorated on the Herschel Road area and at Slough Museum.