Engel's England by Matthew Engel

Author:Matthew Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

Oh yeah, right. Instead of a lowing herd, there was the lowing of successive take-offs from Heathrow and the traffic of the M40 and the drowsy tinklings of a chainsaw. But inside the church, the declining light through the stained glass bathed the place in a moody glow.

Gray is buried in a sarcophagus outside the east wall, along with his mother and beloved aunt. He is not mentioned on the tomb itself because there was no space: the fate of the writer through the ages. But there is a memorial stone on the wall and a monument hidden away in a wood – so discreetly that, in the gloaming, I originally failed to find it, although it is very large and rather coarse. Apparently, there used to be a regular traffic of American tourists here, on a coach from London that offered this as a package with Windsor Castle. And they would stand and recite the elegy in homage.

But that trade seems to have ceased. Perhaps American visitors have become less cultured; perhaps, like me, they were affronted by the racket; perhaps it was because the route took them through the one town in Britain more universally derided than Milton Keynes.

To my astonishment, it took more time to get from St Andrew’s to St Giles’ than it did from St Giles’ into Slough. The very name Slough is the first problem; Betjeman compounded it (‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough’); and its reputation has stuck ever since, as when the famously ferocious Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, uncharacteristically faced with an acquittal in his courtroom, told the defendant, ‘I see you come from Slough. It’s a horrible place. You can go back there.’ The Slough Sewage Works is often held responsible for the stench on the M4.

In the First World War, a huge acreage round here was used as a dump. In the 1930s that turned into the Slough Trading Estate, which generated a light-industrial boom town that absorbed thousands of migrants from the depressed areas.

But the town never weathered. It evolved into a national joke, the obvious site for the Wernham Hogg Paper Company, whose regional manager was David Brent in The Office, the most resonant sitcom of the early twenty-first century. Its one tourist attraction (if we accept Eton as being elsewhere) might have been the observatory where Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus. But, with Slough’s instinctive gift for marketing and PR, it got demolished in the 1960s.

Too tired to drive home, I resolved to spend Friday night in Slough. Some of the pubs were lively, including one known as the Herschel and a modern one called Wernham Hoggs. The High Street was almost deserted save for a few shadowy figures in hoodies, mostly lurking in doorways. I opted to eat in Pizza Express, which was deserted, perhaps the only Pizza Express in the country to have no trade on a Friday night. ‘We’ve been busy all week and all day,’ said the waitress. ‘But people don’t come to Slough to go out.

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