An estate the size of a small town
The Slough Trading Estate began in 1920, when a vast army motor depot left over from the First World War was sold off and turned over to industry. It has stayed in one company's hands ever since, the business once called Slough Estates and now known as SEGRO, and it is usually described as the largest industrial estate in single private ownership in Europe. Mars has made its chocolate bars in Slough since the 1930s, and in the last twenty years the estate has also become one of the densest clusters of data centres anywhere in the country.
For a visitor that history matters less than the scale. The estate spreads across the north west of Slough, with its own grid of avenues, many of them named after British cities, and its own bus stops, and a building at one end can be fifteen minutes by car from a building at the other at the wrong time of day. Before booking a room for a working week, find out which part of the estate your meetings are actually in. It decides everything else.
Which hotel sits nearest which part
Three hotels take most of the estate's visitors, and each is best for a different end of it. The one on Cippenham Lane sits on the western side of town beside junction 6 of the M4, a short drive from the estate's southern and western edges and the easiest of the three to reach from the motorway. The one on Church Street in Chalvey is south of the town centre and roughly as convenient for the motorway as for the station. The third, on the Uxbridge Road, is on the eastern side, better placed for the town centre and the station than for the estate itself.
For the western end, Burnham station on the Elizabeth line sits close to the estate's edge and is the nearest platform for many of its buildings, so a guest staying in London or at Maidenhead can commute by train rather than hire a car. As everywhere on this site, the hotels are named because guests stay in them. This desk has no arrangement with any of them and no front desk is ever told a thing.
Where to eat, and why the Bath Road is not the answer
The roads around the estate are built for traffic rather than for evenings. The Bath Road carries chain pubs and drive throughs, and a week of eating along it will feel longer than the week. The better tables are all a short drive away, and the drive is the price of a good dinner here.
Windsor is fifteen minutes south, with riverside tables and the High Street, and it is the obvious choice for the one evening in the week that should feel like an occasion. Burnham village has a handful of pubs along its one long street, a few minutes from the estate's western end. Farnham Common, up the Farnham Road to the north, has a small village centre with restaurants of its own. And the Farnham Road itself, closer to town, is lined with South Asian grocers and restaurants that feed the town far better than its reputation suggests. A guest who asks locally where to eat curry in Slough gets a longer answer than he expected.
Winning the evening back
A week on a contract has its own rhythm, and it is rarely kind to evenings. Monday goes on settling in. Tuesday and Wednesday are the long days, when the meeting runs over and dinner becomes a sandwich at the desk. By Thursday there is often a client dinner, and by Friday everybody just wants to go home. The evenings that get lost are the middle ones, and they are lost for want of a plan rather than for want of time.
The fix is to decide on Monday which evening is yours and to book it then. Leave the estate by half six that day whatever happens, and let the evening begin at seven with somebody who is not a colleague. Two hours at £500 is enough for a drink and dinner in the hotel. Three at £700 takes you into Windsor for a table and back again without anyone watching a clock. The hours are for company and conversation, and after three days of meeting rooms that turns out to be exactly what was missing.
The client dinner at the end of the week
Thursday is the traditional night for the supplier dinner, the team meal or the awards evening in a hotel function room off the A4. Arriving at those on your own is an ordinary thing to do and it is also, at a table of eight couples, a long evening. The business evenings booking puts a companion beside you who will hold her own with the stranger on her left, listen to a quarter of an hour on supply chains without glazing over, and drift off towards the bar unprompted when you need a private word with a client.
Send Etta a short brief for her: what your firm does, which two people at the table count, any subject best avoided and what the invitation says about dress. A reception with canapes and no seating fits inside two hours at £500. Once there is a seating plan and a speech, allow four hours at £900, since nobody has ever known an awards dinner to finish when the programme claimed it would. In both cases she is handed the fee in person on arrival, the figure Etta has confirmed in writing, and her seat at the event is yours to arrange.
A town worth an evening of its own
Most people on a week's contract see the estate, the hotel and the M4 and assume that is Slough. It is not the whole of it. The station has a history that begins with a queen, the centre has a library and performance space in The Curve on William Street, and the parks are better kept than anyone warns you. The guide to Slough beyond Betjeman is written for the visitor who has an evening to spare and some curiosity about where he has been working.
Who does a working week well
Sonya knows the business parks after everybody has gone home, likes honest food and an early swim, and is entirely at ease in a hotel that exists for conferences. Violetta is used to being looked at and does not mind it, which is useful at a client dinner where everyone turns round. Samanta is the calmest half of any evening she is in and prefers hotels with no pretensions, which is most of the rooms near the estate.
Sonya and Violetta are both on the thirties list, and Violetta and Samanta are among the statuesque. Tell Etta which evening of the week is yours and she will say who is free.
Cross filed: most of the names on this marker also sit on the brunettes list under by look.