Premier Inn, Slough Central South

 

Slough - Premier Inn, Slough Central South 

Windsor Road, Slough, SL1 2EL 

April 2023

 

‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough, It isn't fit for humans now’. That’s what John Betjeman said about the town eighty or so years ago. The place hasn’t improved in that time; moreover, if our stay at this PI is anything to go by, I might well not be the only one recalling those words. 

We were in the area for a few days, visiting Marlow, Maidenhead, Windsor and Beaconsfield. Slough seemed the logical place to stay, and, trusting that a PI is less likely to disappoint than some more expensive hotel chains, we chose this one. We did end up disappointed, but, it has to be said, not as disappointed as we would have been if we had paid more than the £332 we had for four nights room-only.

The room was pretty much standard for PI these days: good availability of power points, a large screen Freeview TV (not, however, tuned to the same channel numbers as listed in Radio Times - GB News and Talk TV were missing), and a sofa and chair as alternatives to the bed or floor when you want to do something other than stand.  The window, offering a view of the wall and windows of the flats opposite, didn’t open, and the heating was controlled by the on-wall LCD control - which did work, but (as at most other PIs I can recall) it was configured for an office environment, and switched off the heating at night. (Surely, if you can’t open the window, you need the aircon to work at night to keep cool?)

The bathroom was standard PI: no shaver socket, no heating, shower over the bath, signs of plaster damage perhaps from an overflow upstairs. It sufficed. 

The blackout curtains worked well: indeed, they actually caused a bit of a problem, in that they made the room very dark at night. We ended up leaving the bathroom light on and door ajar so that we could find our way to the loo in the night.  

PI have made one change in policy since I last stayed at one of their hotels, as advised by posters on the stairways and in the lifts: if you are staying more than one night and want your room serviced, you need to ask at reception and put a little tag on your door handle. I think this is a retrograde step: the convention has always been you should ask for your room not to be serviced, and finding a receptionist in the morning is not always easy. We did ask for our room to be serviced on all three mornings; to show that the system doesn’t work, it wasn’t done on the first occasion, and I had to go down to reception in the evening and request a fresh towel. On the second and third days it was done, although on one occasion we were only given one tea bag and a chipped mug. Housekeeping at this PI is clearly not of a standard they can be proud of.

One problem they clearly have in this PI must relate to furniture. The bed in our room appeared to be narrower than the designer of the room had expected, there were gaps of about a foot on each side between it and the bedside tables - one of which was fixed to the headboard (which was also wider). Fortunately my partner managed to reach her glass of water every time across this gap, but why the bed didn’t fit the room wasn’t quite clear. 

The mystery deepened when we went out the first morning of our stay: summoning the lift from the fifth floor, it refused to come up that far. For perhaps ten minutes we watched the lift displays, one lift seemingly stuck at 0 (ground floor), the other going up and down between 0 and 3. We walked down the stairs, and at the ground floor all was revealed: workmen were occupied with a challenge of fitting a bed into one of the lifts. Perhaps this had happened to our bed and the only way to get the bed up to our room was to reduce it from its intended width, I mused. 

This experience was mildly annoying on that first occasion. It was far less entertaining on the day we checked out, when I had to lug our suitcase down the stairs from said fifth floor while the same workmen moved more furniture about in lifts that are surely intended for guest use. I grumbled loudly about the clear, significant failings as we left: there were no warning signs out for guests explaining that maintenance work was going on and apologising for the inconvenience, and (from experience, many years ago) I know it's much easier, quicker and less destructive (to both furniture and lifts) to take beds up and down stairs in a hotel than it is to get them in and out of lifts.  

The location of this PI is good - a couple of miles north of Windsor Castle, maybe ten minutes (difficult) walk from Slough railway station, and with a good selection of restaurants, shops and pubs nearby. There’s a mini Tesco next door, and a Wetherspoon just up the road; we didn’t use the on site bar or restaurant. (I say ‘difficult’ regarding the walk - there are a few roads to cross, including the A4, where the crossing seems to have been designed on the basis that all pedestrian humanity has all followed JB’s advice and are avoiding the town: to say that using it is a challenge with a suitcase would be an extreme understatement.)

Overall, would I stay there again? Maybe. There is competition nearby, in the shape of a Travelodge and a Moxy, also the rather more upmarket (i.e. expensive) Marriott, and I can’t be sure that any of them would be better. None seemed to have opening windows (I like fresh air!) and may well have equally customer-unfriendly ways of working, so if I ever happen to be in Slough again I’ll most likely be disappointed, however much I pay; having seen some other local towns, I’m not sure there’s anything much better there.  

Having done what we had to in the area we may just decide to keep away. I’m not sure that’s quite how the directors of Premier Inn would like guests to feel after a stay in one of their hotels, they clearly have some work to do.