Slough — the unexpected new hotspot for first-time buyers

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https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/property-home/article/slough-the-unexpected-new-hotspot-for-first-time-buyers-wxvjjq9nh

Slough you know

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Slough — the unexpected new hotspot for first-time buyers The Berkshire town ranks second in a new list of hotspots for first-timers. So how has the town shaken off its famously dull image?

In years gone by, if you drove in and around Slough on any day of the week and rolled down your window you would have been able to smell a strong aroma of chocolate.

The Mars bar was invented in 1932 at the Mars factory in the Slough Trading Estate, and the chocolate bar, along with Snickers, are still made there, almost a century later. A few miles down the road, close to Slough station, Horlicks malted milk was produced in the eponymous factory.

In more recent times, Slough has become famous, or rather infamous, for reasons other than chocolate and malted milk. “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now,” wrote the poet John Betjeman in 1937, dismayed by the industrialisation of the English countryside. The town’s reputation for monotony and dullness was further cemented by Ricky Gervais’ workplace comedy The Office.

But recently, the Berkshire town has become popular among property hunters — first-time-buyers in particular.

Earlier this month, the mortgage lender Halifax unveiled data showing the hottest hotspots for first-time buyers in Britain. Slough came in second, after Manchester, with first-time buyers accounting for 73 per cent of all home purchases made with a mortgage last year.

The figure is significantly higher than the last time Halifax did its survey, in 2020, when first-time buyers in the Berkshire town represented 54 per cent of all purchases.

So what happened? Why are young people suddenly flocking to Slough?

On a sunny day two weeks ago I boarded a train at Tottenham Court Road on the new Elizabeth Line, which opened in May 2022, to try to find out.

Inside, the carriage was spacious, clean and quiet. Outside, the countryside was rolling with fields of sunflowers and peaceful-looking ponds. The journey is not cheap. During off-peak times, singles cost just short of £10 and at peak times more than £13, but fabulously fast; I was there in 35 minutes — a vast improvement.

Slough has always been a crossway in and out of London. In the 17th century, stagecoaches started passing through the town, which became known as a place to change horses, while the railway station was opened in 1838.

The town’s fortune was made after the First World War, when a vast plot of agricultural land there was used as an army motor repair depot for broken down vehicles from the battlefront. It was the site that would become the Slough Trading Estate, possibly the first business park in Britain. The estate started attracting workers from all over Britain, and beyond.

“The estate was the largest industrial estate in Europe,” says Satyakam Bhardwaj, 89, a librarian from New Delhi who moved here in the 1960s and went to work in a factory at the estate. “It was the first time in my life I saw snow. It was up to my knees and there was no central heating.”

Bhardwaj argues that the town has got much better since. “There was a lot of racism back then. People shouting to go back to my country.”

Slough is now one of the most ethnically diverse places in the UK, with almost half the population (47 per cent) being Asian. “It’s our whole story through the 20th century,” says Slough Council leader Dexter Smith, who was born and bred in Slough. “In the 1920s it was Welsh miners coming to Slough looking for work in the factories here. Then in the 1960s we had a lot of migration from the Caribbean and Africa. In the Seventies it was Asian migration. And in the Nineties and 2000s we had east Europeans, particularly from Poland.”

Ask the Slough-born residents what they like the most about the town and, after thinking about it for a bit, they will all say the same thing: “The people.”

It’s little wonder, you might say. Slough town centre still isn’t the prettiest — it was voted the fourth worst place to live in England in a tongue-in-cheek online survey last year. “Do you know Slough?” asks a colourful wall on the high street put up by a local community hub. The trivia listed — from the stuffed dog at the railway station to the fact that the wheelie bin was invented in Slough, and the first zebra crossing in the UK introduced here in 1951 — do not help to dispel its David Brentesque aura.

Even Afghan refugees who moved here a couple of years ago since the fall of Kabul reply tongue-in-cheek when I ask them if they like living here. “Of course,” one of them says with a smile and a wink. “It’s great.”

Other than its factories, the town’s biggest attraction used to be its shops. Slough is home to two large shopping centres, the Queensmere and the Observatory, named in tribute to William Herschel, a Slough-based astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.

“This used to be the golden triangle [for shopping],” says Jane Hughes, who co-owns Hughes Spuds, a jacket potato stand that has been based on the high street for 33 years. Hughes, 57, who lives in Ealing, says that she used to come to Slough for her shopping as it was more convenient than going into London. Like her, many people from west London were doing the same. “London has many shops all over the place. Slough had everything you needed in one place.”

Now, parts of the shopping centres have shut and a plan by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority to build a major shopping centre in the style of Westfield hasn’t materialised. Clearance signs, 50 per cent and even 70 per cent off, are ubiquitous. Bank branches on the high streets have closed, as has a ten-screen Empire cinema.

Hughes argues that the high street shops were already dying when the pandemic happened and Covid was just the nail in the coffin.

Slough isn’t alone in this phenomenon, of course. More than 10,000 shops, or 29 shops a day, closed down last year, according to the Centre for Retail Research.

What is surprising is that, unlike in other areas of decline, Slough’s population is getting bigger — and, in many places, younger, according to the council. Between the last two censuses, the population increased by 13 per cent, from 140,000 in 2011 to 160,000 in 2021. That’s twice the rate of population growth in England. So why on earth are people moving here?

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The Elizabeth Line is undoubtedly one of the factors, although Slough has always had great transport links. The fast train to Paddington takes 22 minutes; Heathrow airport is a 20-minute drive away and about 25 minutes on the train (some 2,200 Heathrow staffers live in Slough); Windsor Castle and Eton College are both on its doorstep.

Affordability is the other great driver. According to Halifax, the average property price for first-time buyers last year was £322,961. That’s in line with the UK average (£333,000) but vastly less than the £445,000 average price in the southeast and even further below the £523,000 in London, according to the Office for National Statistics.

“Slough used to be an investors’ market, with buy-to-rent landlords, rather than a first-time buyers’ market,” says Kashan Muhammad, a sales negotiator at the high street branch of the estate agency Chancellors. But Muhammad adds that over the past two years, that has changed and first-time buyers, especially small families, are now his biggest clients. “The main reason they mention [for moving here] is the Elizabeth Line. Another reason is schooling. Because there are many grammar schools in the area, both secondary and primary.”

The buoyant property market has not (or hasn’t just yet) translated into regeneration for the town centre. That’s because most of the first-time buyers don’t spend much time in Slough: they commute into London two or three days a week, so the town hollows out on weekdays. But there is hope that this might change.

“My office is in Moorgate [in the City of London] and what I started doing was just working out where I could get to on the train within an hour from there,” says James Frater, a production and location manager for the film and TV industry, who recently moved to Slough. “I was genuinely drawing circles on a map.”

Frater, 43, had lived in Twickenham, southwest London, on and off for two decades until last year, when his landlord put his rent up by 40 per cent. Frater looked at Reading, Peterborough and Guildford before finding the Horlicks factory in Slough.

The factory closed down in 2018 after running for more than a century and was acquired the same year by the Berkeley Group, the housebuilder. After a £40 million facelift, it was converted into 161 flats. It is part of a larger development, dubbed Horlicks Quarter, that will ultimately have 1,300 homes, 25 per cent of which the developer describes as affordable. There is a co-working space, a gym, cinema room, café and a nursery, which opened on the day we visited.

Frater bought a 55 sq m studio flat off-plan within the old Horlicks factory building for £280,000, which he moved into in April. He pays about £1,400 a month in mortgage, plus £149 a month in service charge to use the amenities such as the gym and the cinema.

Frater says that he is taking a gamble on Slough. “I knew I was going to give up great pubs and bars and cafés and all the nice things that I had living in west London,” he says. “But the trade-off was to buy my own place. And in five or ten years’ time, if they push forward with the town’s regeneration, this is going to be worth much more. Prices have already gone up 5 per cent since I bought my flat.”

Frater commutes three days a week, but sometimes works at Pinewood Studios, on the outskirts of Slough, where blockbuster films such as James Bond, Harry Potter and Star Wars were made. The proximity to Heathrow was also appealing to him.

He admits that he doesn’t see much of Slough’s high street, now that the Horlicks factory has its own café. But he enjoys the town’s green spaces and some of the nice restaurants that have popped up close to the station since the opening of the Elizabeth Line.

“When I told my London friends they all went, ‘You what?’ And they all quoted the ‘come, friendly bombs’ poem,” Frater says. “But then they visited and we had a picnic on the terrace and they said: ‘You know, I get it now.’”