Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  But Surbiton has become this icon of blandly genteel suburbia thanks more than anything else to The Good Life, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey’s proto-green 1970s sitcom starring Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal as the titular Goods, trying to throw off consumerist trappings and live ‘sustainably’ in suburbia, and Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington as their snobbish but decent neighbours. The Good Life seems a remarkably prescient comedy now, pre-empting our current worries about carbon footprints by decades. At the time, though, this was much less noteworthy than Felicity Kendal’s delightful bottom, which became something of a national obsession.

  To some, The Good Life was TV at its twee-est but this is unfair. The performances were first-rate and in its often issue-based subject matter – gentle eco-warriors in dyed-in-the-wool Tory commuter heartland – it showed far more imagination than the dreary glut of crass and unfunny stuff ‘on the other side’: the Mind Your Languages, Bless This Houses and Love Thy Neighbours. And it had Felicity Kendal’s bottom. Did I mention that?

  But The Good Life more than anything else cemented the borough’s reputation as ‘Suburbiton’. The name of course is a problem. It’s a contraction of South Barton. Its slightly northerly neighbour Norbiton has no jokes about it. And then there’s Alfred Bestall, who for years produced the Rupert stories for the Daily Express. Bestall was a confirmed and rather joyless bachelor, a pillar of the Surbiton Methodist church, who thought that his work for Lord Beaverbrook was an offering to God and, according to the Guardian, ‘sought to purge from the stories that element of darkness he had fearfully detected in the work of his predecessor, Mary Tourtel. He was the essence, you might say, of narrow, fearful, suburban morality.’ With its riverside location and air of bland prosperity, it seems to embody the self-satisfaction of Baron Macaulay’s remark that ‘an acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia’.

  The American girls change for Thames Ditton and Hampton Court, like many of my fellow passengers. I stay on for Surbiton and ‘detrain’ at the really rather lovely station, rebuilt completely in 1937 in the art deco architectural vernacular of the day to a design by J. Robb Scott. It’s a gem, rightly considered by many as one of the finest modern British stations, along with Ramsgate and Manchester Oxford Road. Many of the north’s great railway stations bristle with civic machismo and pride. Surbiton’s exudes a subtler, elegant 1930s Metroland smartness.

  I have lots of time to consider this as I stand beneath its awning and watch stair-rods of rain and hail bounce off the pavements, sending Surbitonites scurrying for cover, their coats pulled over their heads. Sheltering with me are a very classily dressed wedding party looking anxiously at their watches (‘We’re OK for a while yet … after all, we don’t want to arrive and the boat not be there’) and a gaggle of well-behaved but drenched school children in dashing blue blazers. It is the second day of Wimbledon week, the height of the English summer.

  Eventually, as will always happen in Middle England if you wait long enough, the clouds part and the sun comes out. Across the road from the station is a neat roundabout with pretty hanging baskets, faced on the other three sides with architecture and institutions that, according to my original notes, ‘speak of stolidity, security and prudence: HSBC, Lloyds Bank, an estate agent’s where a fairly ordinary semi is priced at half a million quid’. Little was I to know that within two months, the world’s economies would unravel and the banking and housing sector would be in disarray. There is another sign on the roundabout, pointing the way to the local branch of the Samaritans. Then it seemed utterly incongruous. Now it may be getting more business than its three neighbours.

  Down St James Road there is a Waitrose (obviously) and the squat and stout redbrick Surbiton Members’ Club where a large sign proclaims, ‘New members always welcome!!’ So I go in. The man behind the bar is actually polishing the inside of a pint glass with a white tea towel, something I have only ever seen landlords in plays do. Splendid, I think, especially when he says loudly, ‘Greetings!’ Again, this is something I have only heard landlords in plays do. It reminds me of another cardinal virtue of the Middle English: heartiness.

  I ask Geoff – he looked Geoff-ish – whether I have to live in Surbiton to join the club. He looks a little puzzled, as well he might. ‘Well, that’s a good one. Never thought about it. You have to be proposed by a club member.’ Oh well, never mind. ‘You can apply online!’ he adds cheerily as I leave. Later I take a look at the online application form but it doesn’t clarify the residency qualification. What is does tell me, though, and I thought this a wonderfully Surbiton touch, is that the club requests that ‘briefcases should be left in the outdoor area’. As I’m leaving, from the back room I overhear a woman’s voice, in a tone of breathy excitement and confidentiality, saying, ‘She said it was the best cheese on toast she’d ever had.’

  By now of course it is actually too hot for comfort outside, something only the English climate can manage, and I’m mopping my brow as I stroll along the hinterland of residential Surbiton. Here ‘The Mall’ is not a hideous, echoing shopping arcade but a pretty suburban street. As editor of the Architectural Review, J.M. Richards wrote in ‘The Castles On The Ground’ that ‘for all the alleged deficiencies of suburban taste … it holds for ninety out of a hundred Englishmen an appeal which cannot be explained away as some strange instance of mass aberration … the beauty of the despised, patronised suburb.’

  St Andrew’s Square is a neat and beautifully kept if faintly pointless garden. There is no dog poo, no empty plastic cider bottles and its yearold benches – they had plaques with the date on – are gleaming. On the gate is a poster advertising walking tours and a quote from Queen Victoria: ‘Surbiton is, not and never will be a boring suburb’, which it certainly isn’t if a verse posted at Surbiton.com concerning the local YMCA is to be believed. It thanks the Village People for the tune.

  Young man! there’s no need to feel down. I said, young man! Come to Surbiton town I said, young man!

  There’s a place you can go. There’s no need to get a job now!!

  Young man, if you want to score weed. I said, young man!

  Crack cocaine, LSD. I said, young man!

  Here I know you will find. Many ways to get out of your mind

  At Surbiton town’s doss hole Y-M-C-A

  The drugs and alcohol Y-M-C-A

  They have nothing there that a young man won’t enjoy!

  I’ve never really understood who uses YMCAs. Well, it seems in Surbiton it’s chiefly for the use of local young homeless men, which has stoked animosity among some locals. I know nothing about this matter so will refrain from joining in but the interchange is revealing about Middle England. Here’s one correspondent struggling with the twin compulsions of reasonableness and outrage: ‘Regrettably though, whilst we would all support the principles of the welfare state to give someone less fortunate than ourselves a hand up (as we may need it to do for us one day) there are those in society that abuse the system – and consequently plenty of “do-gooders” to jump on the bandwagon and to help them continue do so. In pandering to many of these so-called “homeless” people who have no sense of responsibility, shame, respect or morals (but plenty of money for drink, drugs, cigs and £150 Nike trainers), the YMCA, like many other do-gooders, social workers, judges etc and of course the Gov’t, is helping to perpetuate the problem, not resolve it.’

  The YMCA is in the bosom of town, and a rather nice bosom it is too. Heading inwards, the main street goes from the drabness of Jewsons and a clutter of dusty building work and car showrooms to, quite abruptly, the feel of a smart market town or an upscale village. The chalkboard outside the Lamb pub promises ‘organic meat from the family farm in Dorset, Sunday papers, bookswap, home-made pork scratchings and organic soft drinks’. I think of Orwell and his famous fictitious pub, the Moon Under Water, which was too good to be true. Well, it sounds as if someone has built it on the High Street in Surbiton.

  You can sense real local pride in th
e naming of the businesses, all keen to show off their association with the town. There’s Surbiton Glass, Surbiton Dry Cleaners, Surbiton Business Centre, Surbiton Café. There is an art shop where it’s Buy One Get One Free on large canvases. It also sells ‘silver paper shredders’.

  Why would anyone want to shred silver paper, I think, as I sip my tall vanilla latte in the coffee shop. I blow at the froth and read about rainlashed Wimbledon. The coffee shop is packed, much busier than the pub next door, through the window of which I see a solitary business man tapping at his Blackberry. Maybe it’s the same one I saw in Knutsford and he’s following me. A very elegant lady of about fifty asks if she can join me. She’s got a tall vanilla latte too. We are kindred spirits, she says. We swap papers and after a while, with a sigh straight out of Noël Coward, she says, ‘This Andy Murray may well be marvellous at tennis but it’s hard to warm to a man in a baseball cap.’

  I’m still smiling at this on the train out of Surbiton and back to the grime and greasiness of London. Alongside me in the carriage sits a group of three people; a trendy middle-aged couple and a woman of about twenty-five languidly eating an apple. It turns out they are all teachers at the same college and the young woman is leaving Surbiton for a new job. The older woman has her iPod on and can’t hear the other two’s conversation.

  ‘I may be doing the wrong thing but I have to. It’s about taking my chances,’ she says and then takes a thoughtful crunch.

  There’s a pause and then the man replies with a nod to his partner. ‘She’s distraught that you’re leaving Surbiton.’

  Another pause, another crunch. ‘You’ve still got Sophie,’ the young woman replies, a little tersely I think. ‘Oh, I don’t know … It’s like that Clash song, Should I Stay Or Should I Go.’

  At this point I really want to politely interrupt and say that she shouldn’t be making big life decisions based on Clash songs, especially not that one as it doesn’t make any sense. If he goes there will be trouble, if he stays it will be double. Well, he should go then. Do the math, Mick!

  I don’t say this, as it would be enormously inappropriate. A little human drama is being played out here. I get the feeling that it is the man and not his partner who’ll be distraught to lose his apple-eating friend. I wonder whether Sophie will offer some consolation and whether the young woman will find her own Good Life somewhere beyond Surbiton.

  I don’t think she’d find it in Slough, though, and I hate myself for saying it. I hate lazy, prejudiced thinking and I hate soft targets. I grew up in Wigan and while I have no illogical allegiance to the town and am pretty candid about its shortcomings, woe betide anyone who does comedy accents or jokes about whippets when they find out my provenance. I’ve lived on and off in the West Midlands for years and nothing irks me more than that class of mirthless wag who mocks Birmingham – a vibrant, 24-hour city in the middle of beautiful countryside and full of great people, bars, shops, restaurants, music and culture – from their vantage point in stylish, debonair, futuristic Lewisham.

  Thus it was with Slough. The place has a bad name and I was loath to make it any worse or add to the chorus of general sneering. Though Slough gets a kind of oblique mention in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor when Bardolph is mugged ‘near Eton … in a slough of mire’, it’s in the 1930s when the town’s rampant industrial growth made it a comic target for several writers. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the chimneys of Slough Crematorium are cited as a symbol of ‘progress’. But it was in 1937 that the laureate of suburbia, John Betjeman, fixed Slough forever in the public imagination as a place of blight and despond. The poem ‘Slough’ is known to generations from schoolbook editions, so much so that I don’t propose to repeat it here. Suffice to say that Betjeman hated the way that the rural quality of the area had been swamped by 850 factories and mass housing. He called for the ‘friendly bombs’ to come as it ‘wasn’t fit for humans now’.

  By which he might have meant that it wasn’t fit for wealthy ex-public school boys from Marlborough, of course. It was certainly fit and indeed welcoming to successive waves of immigrants seeking a better life. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployed Welsh families walked here looking for work and found it, as did Irish families on the new trading estate. There were no homes for them so they lived in sheds on an estate called Timbertown. Now I like Betjeman a lot. But it’s against this backdrop that we must read his scathing poem, which, as David Robson wrote in a Daily Express column, whilst ‘purporting to be a lament for nature succumbing to modern ugliness and profit, it is also a privileged man’s cruelty and contempt directed towards people who needed a job and home’.

  He’s right. ‘A house for ninety-seven down/And once a week for half-a-crown’ is easy to sneer at when you live in the Old Rectory, Farnborough, a Georgian country house recently voted ‘Best Parsonage in Britain’ by Country Life. Remember too that Betjeman’s bomb reference was made at a time when everyone knew that Hitler was readying himself for war. It’s a lot less cute as an opening line when you know that the Luftwaffe were starting their engines and loading the bomb-bays.

  After the war, immigrants came from further afield, first the Caribbean and then Eastern Europe. Slough Council made history by electing the country’s first black female mayor in 1984, and has the highest percentage of Sikh residents in the country. As I was to find out, diverse does not even begin to describe the town now. It is so kaleidoscopic as to be bewildering. None of which really explains why Slough should have been made fun of so famously by several generations. Slough attracts jokes and slurs like it attracts incomers: in droves, seemingly at random and to the exasperation of long-standing Sloughites. Comedian Jimmy Carr has a joke that goes, ‘I grew up in Slough in the 1970s. If you want to know what Slough was like in the 1970s, go there now.’ Sour ex-Goon Spike Milligan spoofed Slough as a holiday destination, a gag elaborated upon by prog rockers Marillion in the song ‘Costa del Slough’, with the town as a post-global warming coastal resort.

  Ali G, the clueless wigger (white middle-class youth desperate for the cachet of being black) created by Sacha Baron Cohen, is supposed to come from nearby Staines and often ‘disses’ Slough as uncool. In a survey by the Campaign to Protect Rural England in 2006, Slough was voted the least tranquil place in England.

  There are odd little things in the town’s CV too. It is twinned with the Latvian city of Riga and was, in the 1960s, the HQ of sci-fi puppetmaster Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation film company. Slough is thus the home of Thunderbirds, Stingray and Fireball XL5. The latter would often venture to Mars, which gave its name to a chocolate bar. That bar was made in Slough. Perma-smiling ice-skaters Torvill and Dean trained at the ice rink here. The Slough Stench is the local term of abuse for the smell that emanates from the vast sewage treatment works just off the M4. Perhaps most damning of all, the Soviet KGB made detailed 1:10,000 maps of nearly all urban areas of the UK in preparation for invasion. They didn’t bother with Slough.

  Slough’s most famous modern resident is certainly not enamoured of the former Poet Laureate’s verses. He is proud of the town and took Betjeman to task on British TV in 2002.

  ‘This is the poem “Slough” by Sir John Betjeman. Now – he’s probably never been there in his life. Right. “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough. It isn’t fit for humans now.” Right, I don’t think you solve town-planning problems with dropping bombs all over the place, so he’s embarrassed himself there … “It’s not their fault they often go to Maidenhead.” There’s nothing wrong with Maidenhead, no … Maidstone’s a shithole, but Maidenhead’s a lovely town, so, nah … Leamington – now I’ve been to a conference in Leamington, and it’s a lovely spa town, especially compared to Coventry, down the road, which proves my point – you don’t sort out a town by extensive bombing. So, y’know. And they made him a Knight of the Realm. Overrated.’

  David Brent is, of course, the wince-inducingly deluded and self-important middle manager of the Slough-based p
aper company Wernham Hogg and, of course, he isn’t real. He is a creation of the aforementioned Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and the central character of the enormously successful sitcom The Office. Gervais and Merchant have been vague about their choice of location. ‘Why Slough? Apart from it being onomatopoeic – Slooough – we wanted somewhere very ordinary and unglamorous. Not that I know, I’ve only been there once when I was a kid. It probably has changed … Apparently [Slough Tourist Board] wrote to the BBC after the first series went out. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but the gist of it was that they wanted us to know that Slough’s changed. I don’t know what they expected, whether they wanted David Brent to look out of the window and say, “I love the new pedestrianisation of the city centre, it’s great for shopping, isn’t it? Anyway, Gareth …”’

  In an interview with the Guardian, Reading-raised Gervais was more forthcoming.

  ‘If you live in the Thames Valley, you’ve got Reading, Slough, Swindon and on to Bristol one way and London the other. It’s your neighbourhood.’ On the end-title sequence of The Office, he’d wanted to show the sign that says ‘London, 25 miles’. ‘Like they’d be saying, “look, that’s all it is, 25 miles. All you have to do. You could walk it…” The message behind The Office is for God’s sake don’t come here. Be true to yourself.’