Above: Segro’s current headquarters continue the dingy colour scheme and tired arrangement of vertical rectangles that seems to be the default setting for every office building now; visually neat but unremarkable seems to be the motto. The little stone bench in the bottom right is a cute addition, although quite why anyone would want to sit and face the traffic on the busy Bath Road is anyone’s guess.
Now, it’s time to address the rampaging gorilla in the room: Brexit. More specifically, how will Britain leaving the EU affect the Trading Estate in particular, and Slough in general?
Ever since its earliest days, the Slough Trading Estate has hosted international companies (“Foreign companies”, if we are to use the unsubtle rhetoric of Brexit). By the end of the 1920s American names like Gillette were rubbing shoulders with continentals like Citroen; these days we have Black & Decker (American), the Anglo-Dutch company Reckitt-Benckiser (makers of household brands such as Dettol, Scholl, Harpic and Nurofen), 1&1 Internet (German), O2 (Spanish-owned), Electrolux (Swedish), Blackberry (Canadian), Fiat and Ferrari (Italian) and scores more, while nearby are multinationals like Danish Lego, American Burger King and British multinationals like GlaxoSmithKline.
The immediate effect of Brexit is that some of these companies may wonder if it’s still worth being here. Freedom of movement and inclusion in the Eurozone is what makes Slough viable for many of these companies, who consequently have large numbers of international staff (“Immigrants”, as the Brexiteers would say) working in them; they are multinationals that maintain a network of operations that span the globe and have a fluid, transient staff that reflects this. European companies in particular will wonder if it’s not better to head back to the continent (or even to Ireland as an English-speaking alternative) and simply import the odd Brit here and there as needs require.
Above: Burger King offices along the Bath Road, Slough. Of course, you could be forgiven for thinking that Westminster was the home of the whopper, so many are told there.
The dangers of European companies shipping out is obvious; what is less so is the possibility of companies from the rest of the world and particularly the United States having second thoughts. Since the early days of the Trading Estate American companies have used Slough as a way into Europe: Johnson & Johnson, Gillette, Mars and others have all used Slough as a production point for goods destined for European consumption-- Friendly-Bombs once holidayed in Greece and found a shop selling Mars bars stamped as ‘Made in Slough’-- but if Brexit makes it difficult for Britain to access the EU market, why bother with the middleman? Plenty of business parks in Germany.
The Trading estate’s strength has always been the diversity of its customers-- companies from all sectors and industries, all corners of the globe, all helping to absorb whatever industrial shock should occur. If the auto companies had to pull out, there were still the chemical and pharma companies, if they left then there were the tech giants, and the consumer brands, and so on. If British and European companies were struggling, there were Asian and American ones waiting in the wings. But this guaranteed supply of industrial tenants was always predicated in part on Britain’s position in Europe-- geographically in the years before she joined the common market, and economically thereafter-- a position that seemed unshakeable until the recent vote.
Ironically, despite such a reliance on foreign companies, Slough was actually one of the few Labour-controlled boroughs to actually vote for Brexit. Why take long-term economic security seriously when you can stick it to the many immigrants that now call Slough home? This baffling result was surely a last middle-finger from a resentful core of people who have never gotten over the diversity of the town, never accepted the spectrum of immigrants that now characterise Slough, who believe the fictions of immigrants living the life of kings on the taxpayer's purse or blame them unduly for crime or unemployment, or who were simply looking for a way to upset the establishment; either way, nary a thought was given to what could actually happen to the town as a result of the country no longer being in the EU.
So what will happen? Maybe nothing will change. Maybe it will become an unviable wasteland. Maybe a changing of the guard, with some familiar faces disappearing from the estate, followed by a probable period of uncertainty… and then in all likelihood a new crop of clients, perhaps from sectors and lands not yet represented on the estate, or maybe even a new generation of British companies. If no-one’s panicking, it’s because nobody has a bloody clue what’s going on, now or in the shape-shifting future, so for now Slough plods on as it always has done.
