It’s a bizarre leap to blame immigration for Eastleigh’s desuetude. I once came across someone describing Eastleigh as a Northern town lost in Hampshire, which is true in part (though certainly not at the super-affluent outskirts). It’s a very thorough bit of planning, and its buildings are a residue of first, Victorian civic culture—the town hall, the two-up-two-downs, the churches, the red-brick Gothic school—and later, something else, something perhaps promising transformation: the garden city estates outside the grid; the ‘Labour Party House’; The Comrades Club, which I’m amazed and pleased to see is still called The Comrades Club, though I suspect it’s a karaoke and real ale fest rather than a hotbed of agitprop theatre. The town was once a Labour stronghold, but boundary changes and drift meant that by the 1970s it was a Tory seat. My Dad tells me that the town once had the second highest Labour membership in the south of England (after Woolwich), but only because anyone who was on the ‘tote’, buying a ticket for the party-run pools from the Labour canvassers, became an automatic ‘member’. It’s hard to imagine any active politics there now, corrupt or otherwise, as it’s gone the way of most places of once-skilled labour—confused, lost, lumpen.
The place is planned for industry, very precisely. Railway Works at one end, Pirelli Cables factory at the other, with a grid of terraces in between and semis at the sides; more channelled and less ‘adaptable’ than any Modernist plan, although like all Victorian urbanism it’s seen as some sort of force of nature, the way things have always been, rather than something directed and planned for industrial, pecuniary purposes. As it is, all the industries I remember being here even in the early 1990s are now gone: the Mr Kipling factory from whence we got slabs of chocolate and the revelation that Tesco cakes were exactly the same as the Kipling cakes, the huge railway works, once one of the biggest in the country (as presumably there’s no demand for new trains in the botched, privatized railway network). Most alarming is the disappearance of the Pirelli factory; I remember it always just in the near distance, at the end of Factory Road. In its place are new Heritage Flats, with street names taken from the handful of famous residents: Joe Meek’s bleach blond boy, Heinz Burt from The Tornados, next to Benny Hill Close. Amusingly enough, there have been proposals to rename Factory Road because it gives the wrong impression of the place. At the centre of Eastleigh is what can only be described as a Socialist Realist sculpture depicting a railwayman, erected around the time the railway works was being closed down. Eastleigh is the truth of the arcadia Chris Huhne wants to save from ‘urban sprawl’. If Eastleigh has a history, it’s made up of grids, planning, towns appearing out of nowhere, industrialization and infrastructure, closely linked to the metropolis to the point of originally being inhabited by Londoners—but with its renamings and pseudo-Victorian architecture it tries to rewrite itself into a quaint little town, which it never actually was. The Solent City is nearer to the historical reality of this place than the bizarre village fantasies of Benny Hill Close.
Eastern Dock
Like the abortive Solent City, Southampton itself has two centres, or a centre and an ex-centre. The ex-centre is where you could almost believe that you were in a great port city rather than a failed, dead yachting and shopping town. It is centred on two ex-places: the former Southampton Terminus, closed by infamous 1960s Conservative rationalizer Dr Richard Beeching, and the Eastern Docks, where the Titanic set sail in 1912. Heritage Southampton is entirely obsessed with the Titanic, not for any good reason, but because it’s famous. The recently elected Tory Council had planned to sell off part of what is the City Art Gallery collection, one of the finest in non-metropolitan Britain, for the sake of creating a Titanic Museum in a ‘cultural quarter’ by the Civic Centre. Plans were laid to flog parts of a collection that features Picasso, Rodin, Blake, Flemish masters and Vorticists, Op Artists and Renaissance altarpieces, in favour of yet another attempt to drag tourists kicking and screaming to an increasingly provincial town. Thankfully, the council were (perhaps temporarily) deterred by a public campaign and a petition, which, while failing to sway the local press, found wide support outside of Southampton and among the city’s usually quiet intelligentsia. The planned Titanic Museum will still go ahead, using what are darkly described as ‘alternative sources’ of funding.
There is in fact a permanent exhibition about the Titanic in the Maritime Museum by the Eastern Docks. However, that’s in the ex-centre. The Civic Centre is far nearer to the WestQuay uber-mall and the Western Docks. The new Heritage Museum will include an Interactive Model of the Titanic, while the building entails a glass extension and remodelling of one wing of the 1930s Civic Centre, to be designed by award-winning regeneration engineers Wilkinson Eyre. It’ll also be the first time—after a housing scheme by Richard Rogers was recently rejected—that an architect of any note has built in the city (as opposed to its University) since the 1960s. The ‘cultural district’, a belated sop to something other than mammon in a city that is otherwise cravenly devoted to it, is planned to include a ‘mixed use’ block by once famous 1980s postmodernists CZWG, but so far the only part of the area where building has actually taken place involves the replacement of an international style block of the 1960s with an international style block of the 2000s, in an act of astounding pointlessness. The redevelopment of the (listed) interwar Civic Centre has annoyed the traditionalist likes of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ column, but as this stripped classical complex is already functionally little more than a roundabout flanked by offices and malls worthy of a business park in Fareham, the damage was done a long time ago. The suspicion that Wilkinson Eyre were hired because the councillors had seen their Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, rather than for the work they had produced elsewhere, is inescapable. No other towns really exist.
South Western Hotel
But get someone to drop you off at the old Terminus blindfolded, take off the blindfold, look around, and you could believe you were Somewhere. There’s a lush square ringed by stylish bow-windowed terraces, some Gin Palace-like Art Nouveau hotels, the handsome former station and, oddest of all, the South Western Hotel. Now—obviously—luxury flats, this was The Hotel Where The Titanic’s Passengers Stayed, a wonderfully ridiculous high-Victorian confection that would look at home in South Kensington. More interesting is the block adjacent, a 1920s extension of the hotel. It’s a freakish anomaly in the city, an example of hard Grosstadtarchitektur, eight storeys, minimal classical ornament: perhaps inspiration was taken from the thousands of New Yorkers who must have stayed here.
According entirely with the ‘Manhattanism’ described by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in his book Delirious New York, the South Western Hotel is an example of the ‘culture of congestion’, irrespective of its serene 1920s façade. Its skyline is never quite clean or precise, due to a series of accretions—first the 1870s hotel given its dramatic 1920s extension, then some more utilitarian extra storeys added during its successive uses as the local BBC headquarters between the 1960s and the 1990s, and its subsequent use as luxury flats, all creating an illegible jumble. Even on the Portland stone front of the 1920s extension, one corner abandons the classical symmetry, going off in its own utilitarian direction, leading to the seedy stock brick of the sides facing the train shed. It’s as if the metropolitan skyline the city otherwise lacked were incarnated solely in this building, dominating everything around it, especially from the raised vantage point of the 1970s Itchen Bridge. The South Western Hotel introduces into Southampton a robust urban scale that is replicated nowhere else in the town, with nothing taller (bar the Civic Centre clock tower) built for half a century. Its environs are one of the few places where you can get some idea of what the first skyscrapers might have been like, in that