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British poet laureate from 1972 to 1984, John Betjeman (1906-84) was a broadcaster and writer on architecture as well as a poet. His attack on the Berkshire town of Slough, in the poem ‘Come, friendly bombs’ from the collection Continual Dew (1937), stems from his hatred of modern architecture and mass society – he was nostalgic and hated change, preferring the countryside to the city. In the 1930s, some 850 factories were built in Slough, as well as new suburbs to house the expanding lower-middle classes who worked in them. However, while Betjeman urges the bombs to pick out ‘that man with double chin/Who'll always cheat and always win’, he also asks them to spare the ‘bald young clerks’. In 2003, when the hit BBC-TV comedy The Office was set in Slough (and featured the descendants of those 1930s’ clerks), it was another blow for the town. The upper-middle classes living in nearby Windsor and Maidenhead, who shared a postcode with Slough, quickly launched a petition to have a new one created just for them. Petition organiser Sam Sethi admitted that snobbery was a factor in the campaign.
