Slough Trading Estate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Slough Trading Estate founded in Slough, Berkshire in 1920, was the UK’s first business park. Today it is the largest park of its kind in Europe, providing 672,000 square metres of mixed-use space extending to 1.97 square kilometres. The estate itself extends to 486 acres, equal to nearly 326 football pitches and is bigger than London’s Hyde Park. There are over 600 buildings.
The Estate is home to 400 occupiers from countries including America, Italy, Japan, Germany and Korea supporting 20,000 jobs. Companies using the park include Centrica plc, Yell, Electrolux, GlaxoSmithKline, Mars Confectionery, ICI Paints, and Sara Lee. It is also home to important small, medium and large businesses. The first ever Mars Bar was made there in 1932 and 3,000,000 Mars Bars are produced here every day.
It is owned and operated by Slough Estates International Plc.[1], and once included a railway directly linking the factories to Britain's railway system.
The estate’s power station [2] supplies heat and power to the entire industrial site. It is one of the most environmentally friendly and technologically advanced in Europe and 30,000,000 litres of water can be stored in its reservoirs, pumped straight from their own artesian wells.
Langley Business Park and Langley Business Centre are other thriving business estates in Slough, with other companies, industries and enterprises found throughout the borough.
Contents |
[edit] History
In 1920, two years after the end of the First World War, Sir Percival Perry, who later ran the British operations of the Ford Motor Company, and Sir Noel Mobbs, led a group of investors who acquired the 2.7 square kilometre (600 acre) site on the Bath Road in Slough, Berkshire.
"The Dump" as it was known, contained 17,000 used cars, trucks and motorcycles left over after the war. The idea was to refurbish them and sell them to meet the steadily growing public demand for vehicles.
The Dump also contained a great deal of what today would be called "workspace". 170,000 square metres (1.8 million sq ft) of covered workshops in fact. These would become surplus to requirements once the vehicles had been repaired and sold and could be leased to local businesses.
The Dump rapidly expanded and diversified, eventually coming to be known as the Slough Trading Estate.
[edit] Slough Trading Estate in popular culture
In the Ricky Gervais comedy The Office, the opening credits show Slough Trading estate, where the fictional paper merchants Wernham Hogg are supposedly located.
