Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!Contents
First verse
"Slough" is a ten-stanza poem by Sir John Betjeman, first published in his 1937 collection Continual Dew .
The British town of Slough was used as a dump for war surplus materials in the interwar years, [1] and then abruptly became the home of 850 new factories just before World War II. [2] The sudden appearance of this "Trading Estate", which was quickly widely reproduced throughout Britain, prompted the poem. Seeing the new appearance of the town, Betjeman was struck by the "menace of things to come". He later regretted the poem's harshness. [3] The poem is not about Slough specifically, but about the desecration caused by industrialization and modernity in general, with the transformation of Slough being the epitome of these evils. [4] Nevertheless, successive mayors of Slough have objected to the poem.
The poem was published two years before the outbreak of World War II, during which Britain (including Slough itself) experienced actual air raids. Much later, in a guide to English churches, Betjeman referred to some churches as "beyond the tentacles of Slough" and "dangerously near Slough". [5] However, on the centenary of Betjeman's birth in 2006, his daughter apologised for the poem. Candida Lycett Green said her father "regretted having ever written it". During her visit, Lycett Green presented Mayor of Slough David MacIsaac with a book of her father's poems. In it was written: "We love Slough". [6]
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. [7]
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 features a song entitled "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 fit for humans now/ Swarm over death".[ citation needed ]
In the television series The Office , which is set in Slough, the character David Brent (portrayed by Ricky Gervais), reads extracts of the poem interjected with comments such as "You don't solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place, so he's embarrassed himself there, next." The poem is reproduced in full on the liner of the video and DVD releases of the series,[ citation needed ] and a more complete reading was included in deleted scenes released in 2011. [8]
Slough is a town in Berkshire, England, in the Thames Valley 20 miles (32 km) west of central London and 19 miles (31 km) north-east of Reading, at the intersection of the M4, M40 and M25 motorways. It is part of the historic county of Buckinghamshire. In 2021 Census, the population of the town was 143,184. In 2021, the wider Borough of Slough had a population of 158,500. Slough borders the ceremonial counties of Greater London and Buckinghamshire.
Sir John Betjeman, was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.
Christopher Anstey was an English poet who also wrote in Latin. After a period managing his family's estates, he moved permanently to Bath and died after a long public life there. His poem, The New Bath Guide, brought him to fame and began an easy satirical fashion that was influential throughout the second half of the 18th century. Later he wrote An Electoral Ball, another burlesque of Bath society that allowed him to develop and update certain themes in his earlier work. Among his Latin writing were translations and summaries based on both these poems; he was also joint author of one of the earliest Latin translations of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which went through several editions both in England and abroad.
Charles Stanley Causley CBE FRSL was a Cornish poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.
Ebenezer Elliott was an English poet, known as the Corn Law rhymer for his leading the fight to repeal the Corn Laws, which were causing hardship and starvation among the poor. Though a factory owner himself, his single-minded devotion to the welfare of the labouring classes won him a sympathetic reputation long after his poetry ceased to be read.
Metro-land is a name given to the suburban areas that were built to the north-west of London in the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex in the early part of the 20th century that were served by the Metropolitan Railway. The railway company was in the privileged position of being allowed to retain surplus land; from 1919 this was developed for housing by the nominally independent Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited (MRCE). The term "Metro-land" was coined by the Met's marketing department in 1915 when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide. It promoted a dream of a modern home in beautiful countryside with a fast railway service to central London until the Met was absorbed into the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.
"Christ the Lord Is Risen Today" is a Christian hymn associated with Easter. Most of the stanzas were written by Charles Wesley, and the hymn appeared under the title "Hymn for Easter Day" in Hymns and Sacred Poems by Charles and John Wesley in 1739. The hymn eventually became well known for the "Alleluia" sung as a melisma after each line, which was added by an unknown author, probably to fit the commonly used hymn tune, "Easter Hymn". It remains a traditional processional hymn on Easter Sunday.
The Office is a British mockumentary television sitcom first broadcast in the UK on BBC Two on 9 July 2001. Created, written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, it follows the day-to-day lives of office employees in the Slough branch of the fictional Wernham Hogg paper company. Gervais also starred in the series as the central character, David Brent.
The Slough Trading Estate founded in Slough in Buckinghamshire in 1920, was an early business park in Britain. According to the estate's owners and operators, Segro, Slough Trading Estate consists of 486 acres (1.97 km2) of commercial property in Slough and provides 7,500,000 sq ft (700,000 m2) of accommodation to 500 businesses and has a working population of about 20,000 people. Slough Trading Estate is the largest industrial estate in single private ownership in Europe. There are over 600 buildings. The estate is home to 400 tenants from countries including the US, France, Italy, Japan, Germany and South Korea. Companies using the park include Fiat Group Automobiles, Centrica, Hibu, Electrolux, GSK, Mars Confectionery, Akzo Nobel, Virgin Media, O2, AxFlow UK, the datacentre operator Network-i and OKI Printing Solutions. It is also home to important small, medium and large businesses.
The Shell Guides were originally a 20th-century series of guidebooks on the counties of Britain. They were aimed at a new breed of car-driving metropolitan tourist, and for those who sought guides that were neither too serious nor too shallow and who took pleasure in the ordinary and peculiar culture of small town Britain. In the three decades after the Second World War the Shell Guides provided a surreptitiously subversive synthesis of the British countryside.
Candida Rose Lycett Green was a British author who wrote sixteen books including English Cottages, Goodbye London, The Perfect English House, Over the Hills and Far Away and The Dangerous Edge of Things. Her television documentaries included The Englishwoman and the Horse, and The Front Garden. Unwrecked England, based on a regular column of the same name she wrote for The Oldie from 1992, was published in 2009.
Metro-land is a BBC documentary film written and narrated by the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Sir John Betjeman. The film was directed by Edward Mirzoeff, and first broadcast on 26 February 1973. The film celebrates suburban life in the area to the northwest of London that grew up in the early 20th century around the Metropolitan Railway (MR), later the Metropolitan line of the London Underground.
Slough is a town and unitary authority in the English county of Berkshire, just to the west of Greater London. Until 1974 the town was in Buckinghamshire.
Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984) was a twentieth-century English poet, writer and broadcaster. Born to a middle-class family in Edwardian Hampstead, he attended Oxford University, although left without graduating. He turned down a position in the family furniture business, and instead took a series of jobs before becoming the assistant editor of The Architectural Review in 1931, which reflected a deeply held affection for buildings and their history. That same year he published his first book, Mount Zion, a collection of poems.
"We Plough the Fields and Scatter" is a hymn of German origin commonly associated with harvest festival. Written by poet Matthias Claudius, "Wir pflügen und wir streuen" was published in 1782 and set to music in 1800 attributed to Johann A. P. Schulz. It was translated into English by Jane Montgomery Campbell in 1861. It appears in a shortened form in the musical Godspell, as the song, "All Good Gifts". It is among the most performed of hymns in the United Kingdom.
A Passion for Churches is a 1974 BBC television documentary written and presented by the then Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman and produced and directed by Edward Mirzoeff. Commissioned as a follow-up to the critically acclaimed 1973 documentary Metro-land, the film offers Betjeman's personal poetic record of the various rituals taking place throughout the Anglican Diocese of Norwich and its churches in the run-up to Easter Sunday using the framing device of the Holy sacraments.
"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" is a light poem by the English Georgian poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), written while in Berlin in 1912. After initially titling the poem "Home" and then "The Sentimental Exile", the author eventually chose the name of his occasional residence near Cambridge: the titular Old Vicarage in the village of Grantchester. The poem's references can be overly obscure because of the many specific Cambridgeshire locations and English traditions to which the poem refers. Some have seen it as sentimentally nostalgic, which it is, while others have recognised its satiric and sometimes cruel humour.
Constance Winifred Frazer was an Australian poet, feminist, revolutionist and writer.
The statue of John Betjeman at St Pancras railway station, London is a depiction in bronze by the sculptor Martin Jennings. The statue was designed and cast in 2007 and was unveiled on 12 November 2007 by Betjeman's daughter, Candida Lycett Green and the then Poet Laureate Andrew Motion to commemorate Betjeman and mark the opening of St Pancras International as the London terminus of the Eurostar high-speed rail link between Great Britain and mainland Europe. The location memorialises the connection between St Pancras station and Betjeman, an early and lifelong advocate of Victorian architecture.
Slough Town Hall is a former municipal building in Bath Road, Slough, Berkshire, England. The town hall was the headquarters of Slough Borough Council until 2011. The building has been used as a school since 2012.