Don’t mention Sir John Betjeman. In 1937 the poet wrote the immortal lines: ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It’s not suitable for people now.’ But David Sleath, the CEO of Segro – the industrial property group formerly known as Slough Estates – paints a very different picture of the much-maligned Berkshire town.
If Sleath ever decided to step down as CEO, a job on the Slough Tourist Board would certainly beckon for him. “Yes, there is a bit of an image problem,” he admits. ‘But I love Slough.’ Just hold on a little longer, I think, but there is more.
‘When I meet people, I put up four photos. David Brent (the boss in TV comedy The Office), a Mars bar, Thunderbird 2 and the Ford GT40. Then I ask what they have in common. They are all from Slough,” he says.
‘Then the follow-up question. Which is the odd one out?’ The answer, he declares with a flourish, is The Office.
‘The other three were all made on the Slough Trading Estate. While the fictional Wernham Hogg company should have settled on the estate, but the program was not actually made there.’
Big fan: If David Sleath ever decided to step down as CEO of Segro, a job on the Slough Tourist Board would certainly beckon for him
The Slough Trading Estate may not be the most beautiful area in England, but Sleath praises it nonetheless.
‘It is the largest trading area in Europe. Seven thousand people work there.
“Slough was once the largest manufacturing center in Europe,” he adds, warming up the theme. ‘There is a very rich industrial heritage. It went through a dip in the 80s and 90s when production declined.”
Now that online shopping is so popular, he believes it is the ideal location for logistics warehouses, film and TV studios and for data centers of, for example, Amazon.
‘There is a power station. And Slough sits atop the main fiber optic communications cables that run across the Atlantic Ocean.
“It’s close to London and Heathrow Airport,” he says. “It’s very well positioned.”
Since he is Slough’s biggest fan, why would he change the name of the company that was founded more than 100 years ago?
‘We discovered that foreigners couldn’t pronounce Slough. Instead they said Slow or Sluf.’
Perhaps to his chagrin, Sleath is not from Slough himself, but was born in posh Leamington Spa and grew up in South Wales.
He went to university in Warwick, where he still lives, and also had a place in London.
He ‘found’ Slough Estates in 2005 when he started working as finance director after 18 years at accountancy firm Arthur Andersen.
“I didn’t know anything about real estate,” he admits. ‘I had only bought two houses in my life. They wanted a fresh look.’ Six years later he became CEO.
Segro shares have risen steadily since the financial crisis and the company is in the elite FTSE 100 index, but Sleath says it is one of the country’s ‘most overlooked’ blue chip companies.
Segro’s activities may not be exciting, but Sleath says they are essential. “Everything we take for granted in our lives – all the goods and services we consume – will at some point involve something moving through our warehouses.
“That became very clear during the pandemic with the rise of online shopping.”
In the past, Segro’s performance was so slow that it was nicknamed ‘Slowgrow’.
But, says Sleath, the great financial crisis of 2008 – shortly after he took over as chief financial officer – proved to be a real turning point.
‘Like many real estate companies, Slough Estates was living in the dark ages and needed to modernise. Then we had the global financial crisis. We came out of that quite well.’
After raising capital through a rescue rights issue in 2009, the company bought its biggest competitor, Brixton. “We thought this was an opportunity that was too good to be true,” he says. ‘We have closed one of the deals of the crisis. One we thought we would never be able to do.’ A year later the company bought several freight warehouses at Heathrow.
‘We saw it as a very important gateway for both goods and passengers. Forty percent of British exports by value go through Heathrow.
“We’ve done some really transformative deals, but the truth is the company hasn’t done very well because it’s been on the wrong side of the decline in Western European manufacturing.
“It had a really tough time in the 1990s and 1990s.”
When he took over as CEO in 2011, Sleath saw “great potential.”
He says: ‘I didn’t want to be CEO. I thought I was perfect as a strong runner-up. But then I thought I could figure out what needed to be done.
“We had to leave some areas. The market was not happy with it at first. They thought we were selling high yield properties and that we had to cut the dividend. We actually didn’t do that.’
Segro has around 40 to 50 projects in development, including logistics parks in Coventry and Northampton, data center projects in Slough and renovations in London.
‘Many companies are having difficulty getting employees back to work. Beautiful buildings would help with that,” he says.
‘We don’t do offices, but we do think very carefully about our developments. We have walkways, outdoor gyms, insect hotels and 250 beehives. There are many types of Segro honey.’
Now he is trying to replicate what he has achieved – in Slough and around London – in other European capitals.
“We discovered the opportunity to build data centers,” he says. “Around a third of the Slough Trading Estate – 35 in total – is made up of these lands,” he adds. “Our job is to provide the canvas for someone else’s activities. We provide a shell – the four walls and a roof – according to modern sustainable standards.
‘Then we hand over the building and rent it out to the resident, whether that’s Netflix, Amazon, Royal Mail or Ocado.’
Policymakers don’t think much about the right industrial infrastructure, Sleath says.
Planning is, just like in the housing sector, ‘a big barrier’.
‘London has lost half its industrial base in the last 25 years. Moving all your logistics and warehouses to Northamptonshire will mean a lot more traffic on the roads.
‘The message is: don’t turn every piece of brownfield into new flats. We must ensure that Britain has a national logistics base that supports foreign investment, innovation and technology investment.
‘Britain wants to be a tech superpower. But you need the industrial base to do it. We are doing our utmost to help the government understand how important our sector is to British growth.
“Our industry can help achieve many goals – whether it’s productivity, being a tech superpower or raising standards.
‘There are 3.8 million jobs in the warehousing and logistics sector. Seventy percent of these are in the Midlands and the North and most earn more than the national average.”
It may be difficult to make Slough warehouses and logistics sound lofty, but Sleath does its best.
‘If Segro didn’t exist, would the world be poorer? I think so, because we create the space in which special things can happen.’
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