“Why does everyone keep joking about Slough?” I asked my friend over coffee, half-laughing, half-serious. His reply -“It’s the town everyone loves to hate” - made me pause. Growing up here, I had always felt Slough had a kind of quiet resilience, a pulse that didn’t always make headlines. And yet, pop culture often paints us differently: as the punchline, the backdrop for office satire, or the anonymous commuter town in films and TV.