… The shores fringed with oak to the very margin, and studded with the fairest vestiges of magnificence and modern comfort, seem to connect the past with the present, like the wild yet bewitching imagery of a poet’s dream.
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD
visiting Southampton Water, 1812
From its shore, the slow-moving estuary seems like the Loch Ness of my dream. The gently rippling surface belies its length and width, a foreshortened trick of the eye as deceptive as the calm surface of the fathomless Scottish lake. It is a liminal space, a place of possibilities, evocative of the deep oceans that lie beyond.
But Southampton Water is an unlikely place to find a sea monster, although occasionally the sinister, half-submerged black bulk of a submarine slips silently out of its military port. Neither sea nor river, this sinuous inlet reaches deep into England’s underbelly like a gynaecologist’s finger. Stoppered at one end by the Isle of Wight, the island is believed to bounce the moon-dragged sea back up the estuary, creating the watery déjà vu of Southampton’s unique double high tides (in fact it is the result of the port’s midway point on the Channel, combined with the Atlantic Pulse and the relative positions of the sun and moon).
Fed by the Atlantic Pulse, it is a fortuitous piece of geography. ‘A seaport without the sea’s terrors, an ocean approach within the threshold of the land,’ extolled one nineteenth-century promoter of its virtues. Here the great Hampshire rivers of the Itchen and the Test conjoin, their chalk-filtered fresh waters mingling in the salt of the seaway. Like the Pool of London at the beginning of Marlow’s journey in Heart of Darkness, in which ‘the sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway’, Southampton Water has always promised adventure and commerce, a country’s past and future. To incomers it was the Gateway to England; to the inhabitants, it became the ‘Gateway to the Empire’. From here too England reaches out into the dark heart of other lands.
Centuries have passed through this inseminal conduit. From Roman barges to ocean liners; from plague ships to Pilgrim Fathers; from French marauders to Hollywood film stars; from Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, laden with Spanish gold for the Virgin Queen, to Goering’s bombers, heavy with a deadlier cargo. Enemies or tourists, missionaries or immigrants, they all entered or left the land here, and in some other age their phantoms are still processing along Southampton Water: the stately red and black hulk of Titanic, crewed by the men of Spike Island; the speed boat piloted by T. E. Lawrence, the doomed hero of Arabia; the flying boat in whose leather seats was strapped the aesthete, the Honourable Stephen Tennant, on course for the tamarisk-lined shores and pink sunsets of the Riviera. Here they pass for ever, these pale, mortal, glamorous ghosts, unobserved by the cars that speed along Weston Shore.
When Weston’s housing estate was built in the 1950s, the council tried to turn the shore into a resort. Like the strand made in the shadow of the Tower of London for Cockneys to swim off, a beach was created and an esplanade was constructed, studded at intervals with shelters built like waiting rooms for a railway which would never come. Old photographs show holiday makers in their Sunday best, strolling the prom, children paddling at the water’s edge.
Nowadays Weston Shore, at the bottom of the hill from Sholing, seems a grey parody of a place. The shelters’ windows were long ago shattered and the beach reclaimed by banks of shingle and scrubby grass. Here the land lies low, and often floods, as if to mark its transition from the city’s edge to the woods ahead, where the road inclines to leave the shore through a tunnel of trees, and from where it rises then falls again, gently and without due ceremony, into the village of Netley. Even now, those few hundred yards act like a timeslip, a fault in the chronology; as though, having passed through this interzone, you have left one world for another. The concrete tower blocks at your back and the ancient woodland ahead only serve to make Netley’s past all the more extraordinary.
Netley extends the tongue of land that begins at Sholing, bounded by the Itchen and Southampton Water on one side and the Hamble river on the other, the borders of Spike Island. Half ceded from the coastline, this peninsula is occupied by villages which long ago lost their discrete identities to new housing and the out-of-town developments spreading along the motorway corridor – the visible symptom of what Nikolaus Pevsner called ‘subtopia’. Subsumed by light industry, yachting marinas and modern estates, it is a place of retreat and recreation; a faithless culture that seems to have no other aim than the nearest shopping opportunity. It is as though England lost its way in this cul-de-sac; as if it gave up keeping the barbarian at bay.
Nothing happens here now. But once it did.
In 1826, during one of his ‘rural rides’, William Cobbett called on the Chamberlaynes at Weston Grove, their marine villa on the shores of Southampton Water. The estate is now only discernible by stately cedars among the council houses and the traces of a carriage drive in neighbouring Mayfield Park, but in its brief century of existence it epitomised the area’s Georgian gentility, a time when the eastern banks of the water were studded with such mansions.
William Chamberlayne had built the house, where he lived with his sister, in 1802, on land inherited from his close friend and neighbour, Thomas Lee Dummer of Woolston House. Already a major landowner in the area, Chamberlayne had used his friend’s bequest to extend his domain down to the shore and inland through Sholing’s valleys, where the houses around Church Path were ‘Chamberlayne’s cottages’, humble dwellings for his subjects (as we, living on roads named after our masters, still seemed to be). He had also demolished several houses to ‘improve’ the landscape, in the current parlance. Cobbett, a Tory-turned-radical and famed for his polemics against industrialisation and its consequences for rural England, considered that Chamberlayne ‘and his equally benevolent sister’ had set ‘a striking and a most valuable practical example’ for their fellow land-owners. ‘Here is a whole neighbourhood of labourers living as they ought to live; enjoying that happiness which is the just reward of their toil.’ In such a setting England’s green and pleasant land could be reinvented, the broken connexion between land and man remade.
Yet as Cobbett may have suspected, the threat to that idyll was irrevocable; it had been for some time. In Chamberlayne’s grounds, in the wooded valley which continued from Church Path through his parkland and down to the sea, was Walter Taylor’s mill, a modern, industrialised version of the windmill which stood above it on the hill, its site now surmounted by a stone obelisk. Established in 1762 and powered by the water from Miller’s Pond, there had been a mill here since at least the fourteenth century. Now a new machine had been installed, a circular saw invented by Taylor for cutting ships’ blocks out of hard lignum vitae imported from the West Indies and South America. It was a significant marker in the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s expanding empire: here, in this damp valley where kids now chuck empty Coke cans, the rigging for HMS Victory was made.
Chamberlayne’s estate dominated the peninsula, the ruler of Spike Island in all but title, and Cobbett’s description read like the literary equivalent of a nineteeth-century watercolour:
To those who like water scenes (as nineteen-twentieths of people do) it is the prettiest spot, I believe, in all England … The views from this place are the most beautiful that can be imagined. You see up the water and down the water, to Redbridge one way and out to Spithead the other way. Through the trees, to the right, you see the spires of Southampton, and you have only to walk a mile, over a beautiful lawn and through a not less beautiful wood, to find, in a little dell, surrounded with lofty woods, the venerable ruins … which make part of Mr. Chamberlayne’s estate …
Those venerable ruins represented the old England; a fantasy which would inspire a new cult – that of the gothic. Set back from the sea like a series of theatrical flats behind the green drapery of trees, the medieval remains of Netley Abbey might have been designed as a piece of stage scenery by William Kent, the gothic taste-maker who once planted a dead tree in Kensington Gardens. It was a place which had ever been wreathed in a sense of its own mystery. Throughout its history, it seems, this wooded