Appropriately, the work of the city architect who planned Millbrook—Leon Berger, a Modernist trained in Liverpool and perhaps intent on applying some of its architectural ambition to its rival—is indeed a sort of amalgam of the period’s motifs and clichés, applied with some wit, occasional panache and more occasionally, real talent. Zeilenbau (‘line-building’, a rationalist plan popularized at the Bauhaus in the 1920s) arrangements of disconnected blocks in open space at the estates on the eastern edges like Weston Shore or Thornhill; mixed development everywhere else, containing some or all of béton brut, rubble stone, weather-boarding, bare stock brick, slabs and points in varying quantities. Yet Millbrook’s bleakness coincided with some extraordinary architecture.
Just outside the Central Station is Wyndham Court, designed in 1966 for the City Council by Lyons Israel Ellis, a firm that acted as finishing school for the more famous New Brutalist architects of the period like James Stirling, architect of the Leicester Engineering Building among others. Listed in the 1990s against knee-jerk opposition from the local press, this is by far the finest twentieth-century building in the city. Without employing the easy formal references that mark the city’s post-1979 shopping centres and flats, it immediately evokes the cruise behemoths that sailed from the nearby port. A glorious concrete Cunard, impossible to ignore, moored in a city otherwise intent that nobody should notice it—and it’s still, as the satellite dishes imply, a functioning block of social housing, which would be unlikely now in London or Manchester. It clearly hasn’t been cleaned in a very long time, and as Joel, gobsmacked, takes several photos, two youths shout over at us, in the fast Estuary/Yokel hybrid that is the Sotonian accent, ‘Itwasn’tmyfaultmydaddidn’tknowjohnniesbroke!’ His urbane Bradfordian sensibilities offended, he asks ‘Can you translate from the vernacular?’, unable to imagine that they’ve been apologizing to us for their very existence. Adjacent is a small bomb site-cum-park, redbrick stumps of buildings, benches, rats and bristling vegetation.
Wyndham Court
Southampton had long been one of the best British candidates for a Ville Radieuse. Victorian planning created The Avenue, a tree-lined boulevard that ran all the way to the ‘Gateway to Empire’, a series of central parks; while the interwar years saw the building of the cohesive, verdant garden estates designed by the Quaker architect Herbert Collins. Collins’s little Letchworths in the northern suburbs were inadequately emulated by the city council in the form of the inept Flower Estate adjacent to the university, its ‘workers’ cottages’ and treeless streets the incongruous setting for perhaps the nastiest of its wide variety of nasty places. This is a place of which I have particularly bitter memories, having lived there as a teenager: most of what I remember is ubiquitous casual violence, something especially fearsome in ‘Daisy Dip’, the estate’s little park, where a friend was baseball-batted for dyeing his hair.
Unlikely as it may seem for a town in Hampshire, Southampton is remarkably violent: Home Office statistics in 2008 listed it as Britain’s third ‘most dangerous city’, with more violent acts per population than anywhere else other than Manchester and Sheffield, both far larger cities.13 Much of this violence seems connected to a town vs gown divide in a city where the smug, affluent gown meets a chronically depressed town. Someone in Liverpool once impressed upon me that the difference between these two one-time transatlantic ports, the thing that makes the smaller of them the more brutal, is the lack of sentiment and civic pride. Liverpool has a whole mythology, however dewy-eyed, of its own importance and civic munificence; Southampton knows it fucking hates Portsmouth but proclaims very little else about itself. At a stretch, perhaps, it is proud of being the embarkation point of the ‘world’s biggest metaphor’ in 1912, and the former home of Matthew Le Tissier, England’s most underrated footballer.
It was not always so mediocre; sometimes the Southampton built in the 1950s and 1960s could be positively dramatic. Leon Berger’s work took ‘mixed development’ to an occasionally preposterous extreme. A one-storey house next to a three-storey block of flats next to an eighteen-storey tower, Berger’s Shirley Estate exemplifies what is striking about this architecture. I used to look at this place with some awe as a teenager, Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’ running round in my head. This is appropriate, as Polish is now heard almost as often in Shirley as English, in a town which has always had a large Eastern European contingent—I propose a twinning of Służew and Thornhill. In winter, the tower is shrouded in mist, as if it were a mirage. None of the gardens are private, which we’re now supposed to think is a bad thing, and the tower is simply enormous, nearly as wide as it is tall, infilled with panels of rubble as if to evoke the medieval town centre. There are three of these, in Shirley, Redbridge and St Mary’s, and from an elevated point they become beacons in this sprawling, low-rise city, seeming to point to somewhere out of here.
The buildings the council didn’t sponsor, those in the marvellously named central strip Above Bar and its environs, are in the style recently and amusingly described by Stephen Bayley as ‘John Lewis Modernism’, here at its most nondescript. When containerization and Heathrow destroyed Southampton’s raison d’être, it gradually realized its future was to become Hampshire’s Shopping Extravaganza, dragging the burghers of the New Forest, Romsey, Winchester et al. into the city to buy stuff. The city went through several drafts and false starts before it finally succeeded in its aims with the gigantic WestQuay in the twenty-first century. Draft One: East Street Shopping Centre, designed in the late 1960s. Nobody comes here. I can’t remember anyone ever coming here. It adjoins a huge concrete office block, the Capital Tower, which is architecturally undistinguished but has a classic Brutalist escape staircase offsetting the mediocrity of the rest. Its apparatus of ramps and car parks cuts the centre off from the inner city and from St Mary’s, the district that is Southampton’s beating heart (currently more of a pacemaker). I recently found a copy of Le Corbusier’s The Modulor in East Street Oxfam. It seemed apt.
East Street Shopping Centre
East Street, actually placed in (or rather terminating) a street, and adjoining a tall, hard building, was clearly not sufficiently suburban. Draft Two, built in the early nineties: the postmodernist mall of the Bargate Centre sited next to the titular Bargate itself, an ‘iconic’ medieval remnant, and designed by the prolific and hopelessly mediocre local architects W. H. Saunders. In Southampton even ‘alternative’ culture happens in shopping malls, and the Bargate found its niche in the late 1990s by catering to ravers, skaters, Goths and metallers rather than the original targets of tourists, children and their harassed parents. The medieval walls, and flats used by the council for emergency housing, sit at the Bargate Centre’s edges.
The Bargate is one of four big malls in the city centre. On the outskirts Eastleigh, a former railway works with houses attached, adds another, the Swan Centre. It’s now being redesigned in a metallic, vaguely deconstructivist manner, indicating that its bricky Postmodernism has been thoroughly superseded as the architecture of retail. I used to live right next to this mall, which swept away Victorian market streets, much to my joy. As a child I loved malls. We never used that Americanism (these were the more prosaic Shopping Centres), but I had a birthday in McDonalds with branded party hats and gifts, I ate Donuts and Deep Pan Pizza, and as adolescence hit I listlessly read magazines in WH Smith until I was thrown out. I was glad when I realized there was a word, loitering, for this pastime.
Upon moving into the city proper, my affections were transferred to the Marlands, Draft Three of the Sotonian Mall, which replaced a bus station (the city hasn’t had this basic amenity in decades) and encased under fibreglass a fragment of the Victorian street it replaced, eating it up as a gesture of genuflection to complement the atrocious, grinning stone-clad façade. The Marlands nearly went bankrupt, but was transformed into the expressively named ‘The Mall’, where it now reaches a canopy out