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“Welcome to Slough”
As my train grinds to a painful halt at the station I manage to disguise a hearty guffaw (yes, guffaw.) as a kind of hideous chest-infection cough when I catch sight of this sign. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a posh kid. I currently live on a Hackney estate where someone got shot about 3 metres from our front door and my Dad’s from Burnley. But in my opinion David Brent has just about nailed the Slough-coffin well and truly shut. According to Wikipedia “Slough has the highest level of reported anti-social behaviour in the Thames Valley Police area” – and its biggest rival is a place called ‘Staines’. If your greatest aspiration was to overthrow somewhere called Staines then you have problems.
I’m re-writing the sign. ‘Welcome to Slough – where not only great quality narcotics are produced, but where dreams are born.’
The immediate impressions we have on areas confirm that cities and places are brands too, as we learnt on our Jack Morton visit last week. I was thinking about what brands places would be if they had to be related to a product. I’ve thought of a couple of places that I’ve passed through in the past year or so:
Slough = Bovril. Thick dirty meat extract/sludge that no one really likes and everyone prefers the counterpart Marmite/Staines.
Sheffield = Make Us A Brew (the brand of tea bags by Mr. Scruff). Down to earth, friendly and does what it says on the tin.
Birmingham = Nokia. It’s better if it just slinks quietly away into anonymity.
Stoke Newington = Abel and Cole. It has to be. Organic and ethical and probably wearing friendship bracelets.
Amsterdam = Innocent. Ironic right? It’s pretty quirky and puts out some strange little messages, but everyone loves it anyway.
Malvern = Twinings. This is my home town where the average population age is about eighty five and people walk a lot.
Newcastle = Wagamama. Quick and easy, fast moving, loud but tasty.
Vauxhall = Vivienne Westwood. It can be a bit of a mixed bag. There’s some pretty crazy looking stuff, but there are some gems there…possibly found somewhere around Worgan Street…
