I will begin, then, with the environment that did most to shape me.
Chapter One
Southampton: Terminus City
‘I will begin, I said, where a man might first land, at Southampton.’ This is how J. B. Priestley opens English Journey, and so begin the accounts of sundry other English travellers from the Edwardian era up to the 1970s. Until Heathrow replaced it, Southampton was where most visitors or returning travellers entered the country. Now, however, the main entities to land at and depart from Southampton are consumer goods, manufactured in China, unloaded at the city’s Container Port, and freighted round the country by rail and lorry. What hasn’t changed about the town is the way it appeared to Priestley as something indistinct, something that wasn’t quite a place. ‘It had no existence in my mind as a real town, where you could buy and sell and bring up children; it existed only as a muddle of railway sidings, level crossings, customs houses and dock sheds; something to be done with as soon as possible’. Well, children are born there, and they do grow up there. I was, and I did. And things are most certainly bought and sold in Southampton.
Although this book is written in great suspicion of the New Labour strategy of regeneration via the ‘creative industries’ and the clawing back of municipal pride from Thatcherite under-development via sheds for sponsorship, relational aesthetics or ‘interactivity’, there is a hint—only a hint—of jealousy there. That is, jealousy that even though I may hate both the built result and its ideological legitimation, at least there is some kind of civic pride in places like Manchester or Gateshead, both on the part of their people and their architects and a sense that these cities are worth visiting for something above and beyond shopping. Southampton missed the meeting where the ‘urban renaissance’ was decided upon—perhaps because, despite being in the lower rungs of the twenty largest cities in Britain, it was never quite fully urban in the sense of being ‘civic’. Too southern and too surrounded by the Tory heartland for the poor-but-sexy cool by association of northern industrial cities; too close to London to attain an identity and culture of its own.
Even Southampton’s two Universities (one of which is a Russell Group research colossus) are so science-centric that the large student population doesn’t lead to any attendant artiness. Culture is regarded with suspicion within the M27, the motorway which encloses it and connects it to Portsmouth. Southampton is a thousand-year-old nowheresville. Yet this, after all, might be what distinguishes it. I used to be annoyed by the way that whenever my home town was mentioned in a work of art—from Lennon’s ‘Ballad of John and Yoko’ to Wyndham Lewis’s travelogue Snooty Baronet—they never said anything about the town itself. It was only as a place to pass through. Off the boat, onto the train and into Waterloo in one hour fifteen. Southampton was Heathrow before Heathrow, and has never quite known what to do with itself since the ship was succeeded by the jet. I was missing the point though: Southampton is the city as terminus. One of the few to have described what he saw when he arrived was ex-colonial boy J. G. Ballard, who wrote in his memoir Miracles of Life of his shocked first vision of England in 1946.
The Arrawa docked at Southampton, under a cold sky so grey and low that I could hardly believe this was the England I had read and heard so much about. Small, putty-faced people moved around, shabbily dressed and with a haunted air. Looking down from the rail, I noticed that the streets near the docks were lined with what seemed to be black perambulators, some sort of coal scuttle, I assumed, used for bunkering ships. Later I learned that these were British cars, a species I had never seen before.10
Then he’s straight off to London, never looking back.
The secret story of Southampton’s rise to (brief) prominence is deeply unnerving for those who like a city to be marked by the ambition of its architecture, or those who long for the South-East’s grip on the country to be loosened. In the early twentieth century, Southampton overtook Liverpool as Britain’s major passenger port. At exactly the point when Liverpool was erecting megacity monuments along the Pier Head, either to herald arrival at the centre of Empire or the grandeur of Liverpool itself, its business was being swiped by Southampton, with the White Star Line transferring there in 1907 and Cunard following in 1921. (Recently Liverpool has been threatening a belated revenge, with various cruise companies considering a move back to Merseyside, on the grounds that their passengers might want something to look at during their stop-off in England.) It is the misfortune of Southampton to have prospered most during the most uninspired period in British architectural history, the long slumber that lasted from 1914 to 1945. The shipping companies and Port Authorities built no Liver Building here, no ‘Graces’. Southampton didn’t make a distracting fuss about itself, and the provinces were not to get any more ideas above their station.
Southampton, like Coventry, Plymouth and east London, nearly became a non-place in a quite literal sense. In November 1940 the centre was flattened and thousands fled the city, many sleeping rough in the surrounding countryside to avoid returning to the inferno. Yet what happened when reconstruction came? Southampton is twinned with Le Havre, a French port that was similarly ruthlessly blitzed, yet Auguste Perret’s reconstruction of that city as a series of neoclassical towers and boulevards was, while by no means fearlessly Modernist, confident, contemporary, urban, large-scaled, proud. Southampton got a one-storey Portland Stone shopping parade, now featuring the faded imprints of 1990s shop signs, since the shops have almost all moved into the city’s newly-built covered malls. The planners of Le Havre might have cast covetous glances across the Atlantic at the US’s skyscrapers and daylight factories, but those of 1940s Southampton recognized that the future lay somewhere else in the United States. In The Buildings of England, David Lloyd described the parade as being akin to ‘an up-and-coming Mid-Western town with planning control and Portland stone’. While the gigantic ships, those ribbon-windowed beauties that inspired a million Modernist buildings, sailed to New York from just a few yards away, Southampton channelled the spirit of Iowa.
Holy Rood Church
A ghost McDonalds, Above Bar
Shirley Towers
However, Southampton City Council took a thirty-year detour before realizing in the 1990s that Southampton’s destiny was to be the most American city in Britain, in the least glamorous possible sense. In Soft City, an early psychogeographic study marked by a very early 1970s paranoia, Jonathan Raban accidentally found himself in a standard exemplar of the British transformation of Corbusian utopia into dystopia. A planned satellite suburb on the edges of Southampton, a ‘vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people’, Millbrook seemed to be the perfect embodiment of well-meaning failure, producing an isolated and disturbing new landscape. Architecturally, Millbrook is not too bad—the towers, especially, by the Tyneside firm Ryder & Yates, are clever, patterned things—but in terms of planning it’s as desolate now as it no doubt was in 1974, and the pitched roofs on the lower blocks don’t lessen the effect; today they’re as disconnected as ever. Millbrook Towers, the tallest building in the city placed bizarrely in its outer suburbs, may be an elegant building, but doubtless that was little consolation to its inhabitants when recently the lifts were out of action for eight months.11