Slough Trading Estate - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

In 1937, English poet John Betjeman wrote his poem Slough in protest against the expansion of the Slough Trading Estate. The poem bemoans the loss of the area's rural character, and pillories English society's increasing consumerism and the sweatshop conditions caused by large-scale industrial development. An excerpt: "Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn't fit for humans now...."

The Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant comedy The Office is set on Slough Trading Estate. The opening sequence shows several locations in Slough and the Crossbow House building on the Trading Estate where fictional paper merchants Wernham Hogg are supposedly located.

Read more about this topic:  Slough Trading Estate

Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:

    The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
    Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)

    People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

    I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.
    Henry David David (1817–1862)