I live in a village a few miles outside the town of Swindon. Before we moved here, when I worked at Heathrow Airport, I lived in Slough.
Those who aren’t familiar with the niceties of British places, may not realize what both towns have in common (apart from starting with S). They are laughing stocks. They are the towns comedians pick on if they want to make a disparaging remark about a place. It’s no accident that the comedy show The Office was set in Slough.
This isn’t particularly new, either. When the now rather old fashioned (some would say mawkish) but still popular poet John Betjeman wrote about Slough it was to say ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! / It isn’t fit for humans now.’
Admittedly both places have fairly hideous town centres with the obligatory concrete shopping centre and multi-storey car parks – but so do dozens of other towns across the UK that don’t suffer from the same repeated verbal assaults.
I think it’s a much darker, class-ridden prejudice of old, that has lasted with the original reason forgotten. Both Slough and Swindon are railway towns, grown from much smaller places to accommodate the Great Western Railway. (It’s no coincidence that both have a Brunel Shopping Centre.) I can’t help but feel that it is this engineering origin that has labelled these two towns as jokes. To the Victorians, this evidence of being created by dirty toil, rather than aristocratic money that wasn’t associated with anything so disgusting as work, would have been enough to mark them as ‘not for us.’
(Funnily, Slough became more than a village because of an aristocratic connection. When built, Slough station was the station for Windsor, because the powers that be didn’t want a station any nearer the adjacent Eton, presumably in case too many of the boys did a bunk from the school.)
These days, engineering doesn’t have that same stigma, though you can still see a similar distancing in the way science is viewed by those in the arts. There’s a thought. I suppose that makes Nature the Slough of the publishing world.
Brian, I shall not rise to the challenge of your final sentence except to say that Nature is not Slough, but Mount Olympus, Valhalla and Shangri-La all rolled into one. I think it’s got something to do with starting with the letter ‘S’ – Stevenage, Sheffield, Sunderland, Stratford (in East London, if not on Avon). OK, so much for that hypothesis, but what about ‘Sixties’? Many of these blighted places were not helped by the horrid municipal pre-cast-concrete architecture of those unhappy times. I’d add Sheringham, too, but that’s just North Norfolk rivalry…
Never mind Swindon and Slough, or even St Ives and Southampton, try being born in the North—no contest on the snobbery stakes – everyone looks down on you then!
But I agree with Henry (I would, wouldn’t I?) Nature and Proc Roy Soc are type examples of admirable modernity born out of the confidence of longevity. (does this make sense?)
Almost, Maxine, almost. For the record, I was born in Rochdale, once famous for the Co-operative Movement, mills and Gracie Fields. Now for being the location of the TV programme Waterloo Road. (Ah, progress.)
Well, we are almost neighbours then, for I was born in Manchester.
Even more so, as I went to school in Manchester.