170,000 square metres (1.8 million sq ft) of covered workshops) for over seven million pounds. Sir Percival Perry, who had effectively established the British operations of the Ford Motor Company and who had been appointed Assistant Controller of the UK government's Agricultural Machinery Department during the war, and Sir Noel Mobbs, led the group of investors who acquired the depot, establishing the Slough Trading Co. Ltd. Repair and sale of ex-army vehicles continued until 1925 when the Slough Trading Company Act was passed allowing the company (renamed Slough Estates Ltd) to establish an Industrial Estate. The existing army buildings were tenanted as factories, and additional units were built. Those on the Bath Road and Farnham Road frontages were designed with fundamentally uniform simple Art Deco offices on the front. Shared facilities were provided for workforce and employers, including a fire station, restaurant, shops and banks, a large community centre (1937) and the Slough Industrial Health Service (1947). Early businesses established on the trading estate included Citroën (1926), Gillette, Johnson & Johnson and High Duty Alloys. In 1932, they were joined by Mars Ltd and Berlei (UK) Limited. In late 1933 the Slough Estates Journal reported there were 'more than 150 companies' based on the estate. As the Trading Estate grew despite the depression of the 1920s and 1930s, people were attracted from all over the country to come and find work in Slough but the fast increase in population resulted in a shortage of housing. One solution was the construction of Timbertown, an estate of wooden single storey houses built adjacent to the site occupied by the Community Centre and now occupied by Herschel Grammar School. From the outside, the houses looked like an army barracks, but inside they were spacious and comfortable – with 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, a big kitchen and a living room. At the start, Timbertown was well cared for a popular community, with a shop, social hut and even a Sunday school but the buildings soon started to deteriorate. The wooden houses were never intended to be permanent and Timbertown was finally demolished in the 1930s to make way for new buildings. From the late 1950s the estate became home to Gerry Anderson's AP Films, producing a string of successful puppet series for ATV. In 1963 Ford set up Ford Advanced Vehicles on the estate to build the Ford GT40 racing sports car with design