"Slough" is a ten-stanza poem by Sir John Betjeman, first published in the 1937 collection Continual Dew. It was written in protest against 850 factories that were to be built in the English town of Slough. The poem caused an uproar when first published.
However, on the centenary of Betjeman's birth, his daughter apologised for the poem. Candida Lycett-Green said her father "regretted having ever written it". During her visit, Mrs Lycett-Green presented Mayor of Slough David MacIsaac with a book of her father's poems. In it was written: "We love Slough".[1]
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In 2005, Ian McMillan published a poem titled Slough Re-visited using the same metre and rhyme-scheme as Betjeman's original, but celebrating Slough and rejecting mockery of the town as unfair.[2]
Punk band Gallows (who originally formed in Slough, and whose singer Frank Carter has frequently expressed his dislike for the town in interviews) have several references to Betjeman's poem in their music: their album Orchestra Of Wolves featured a song named "Come Friendly Bombs", and an earlier song entitled "Swarm Over Death" (released on the band's 2005 demo) features the lyrics "Come friendly bombs/ And fall here now/ It isn't it fit for humans now/ Swarm over death".
In the first series of The Office, which is set in Slough, Ricky Gervais, in the character of David Brent reads extracts of the poem interjected with derisive comments such as "You don't solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place".[3] The poem is reproduced in full on the liner of the DVD release of this series.