Life as a proud  Slough resident can’t be straightforward – the Thames Valley city has taken its fair proportion of beatings over time, together with that includes because the dreary backdrop for Ricky Gervais’ mockumentary sitcom The Workplace within the early 2000s and, most just lately, being named ugliest within the UK by the Telegraph.

Way back to the Thirties, it has been a simple goal for detractors – with John Betjeman’s well-known protest poem calling on “pleasant bombs [to] fall on Slough”.

Campaigners recommended in 2016 {that a} change of identify would assist to reform the city’s public standing – with its dictionary definition as “muddy quagmire” making a “social stigma” that has impeded its improvement.

The marketing campaign, reported within the Slough Categorical, was shortly damaged up, and much more dangerous press has connected itself to the world within the years since, with its excessive road getting a status as one of many unhealthiest within the UK.

This is because of its “preponderance of takeaways and lack of leisure services,” writes Sally Howard within the Telegraph’s renewed rating of the very best and worst cities within the nation for 2024 – wherein Slough, maybe unsurprisingly, retains its notorious title.

“Pound retailers colonise the shops that cling on in boxy Twentieth-century store fronts,” she provides, in what quantities to a reasonably dismal portrait.

The city, which has a inhabitants of round 160,000, was given a 0/10 rating for shopfronts, 2/10 for historic structure, 0/10 for views, 3/10 for low site visitors and litter, and a 7/10 for greenery, bringing it to an underwhelming complete of 12/50.

Change may very well be coming within the type of a £110 million makeover reportedly deliberate for the world in coming years, nonetheless, giving it an opportunity of catching up with far prettier surrounding Berkshire spots together with Windsor, Eton and Stoke Poges.

There’s one saving grace, no less than – an “wonderful baked potato stand on the Excessive Road, run for 32 years by native John Hughes”, which Ms Howard “received’t hear a phrase in opposition to”.

And locals are fast to leap to its defence. Kate Pratt, 51, who has lived in Slough for twenty-four years, advised Categorical.co.uk: “It’s not a vacationer attraction – apart from for a few years when The Workplace was at its peak and other people visited to have a look at the roundabout and buildings that had been within the opening credit!

“However it’s a place the place folks from throughout the nation and internationally have come to work, to make higher lives for themselves and their households.”

On the brilliant facet, Slough has seen a current rise in reputation amongst first-time patrons, with evaluation from Halifax suggesting that householders had been attracted by its commuter connections and proximity to London with out the eyewatering prices.