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redesigned in a metallic, vaguely deconstructivist manner, indicating that its bricky Postmodernism has been thoroughly superseded as the architecture of retail.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 into some bland postwar blocks. Linked by a walkway at the back—traversing a site that dramatically slopes down to what was once the waterfront—to car parks and an Asda, the Marlands was the first strike in the transformation of a huge swathe of reclaimed land into the aforementioned up and coming (or by now, down and out) Mid-Western town, after Leon Berger’s failed attempts at designing a coherent city. A huge site once occupied by a cable works and a power station was, in the late 1990s, turned into a series of strip malls and boxes. As it went up, curtain-walled office blocks went down, wrapped in plastic like Laura Palmer before being thrown into the sea. Then came the strip malls of Western Esplanade, then some rather functionalist car parks, then the vast WestQuay, the retail behemoth for which the others were merely unsuccessful drafts—and to which we will return later. Southampton today is an experiment, exurban America without the sun or the space.
In Search of Solent City
In 2008 the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh and failed leadership candidate Chris Huhne condemned proposals for the building of thousands of new homes in his constituency.14 This, he claimed, was merely the return after several decades of the ‘Solent City’, which would destroy the local identity of such distinctive, delightful places as Chandler’s Ford, Havant, Paulsgrove and Locks Heath. In the local press this was reported as if everyone would know what the Solent City was, and why it was such a bad thing. Solent City was a mid-1960s proposal by the Harold Wilson government for a new metropolis. It would be made up of Southampton and Portsmouth with a Milton Keynes-style grid-planned linear city strung between the two towns, uniting them into one of the largest and most powerful cities in the country and creating for the first time in centuries a southern city which could resist the pull of London. The Solent City never came to pass, but perhaps its phantom persists in the myths the area tells about itself. The Southampton–Portsmouth war via football, which has caused full-scale riots at least twice in the past decade, says a surprising amount about politics and culture in this unglamorous bit of Southern England. As a Sotonian with family from Portsmouth and Fareham, I don’t quite have the requisite visceral hatred for Pompey that is customary (although I should point out here I don’t go as far as my Grandma, who always claimed to ‘support both’). In any case, what is really interesting in the rivalry is that the alleged historical and political reasons for the intense mutual hatred have been imposed post-facto. For instance, Portsmouth supporters have always claimed that their chosen insult, ‘scum’, comes from ‘Southampton Corporation Union Men’, in reference to a dock strike allegedly broken by Southampton dockers in the 1930s. As Southampton is a commercial port and Portsmouth a military one, this is of course implausible, and I’ve never come across a reference to it in histories of either city outside of the abundant literature of the footballing rivalry itself.
The significance of the rivalry is that both of these cities, in relatively apolitical parts of the country, justify their sporting hatreds largely through reference to history (mutual enmity between military and civilian England) and left-wing politics (through imaginary breaches of working-class solidarity). The two cities like to vie for the roughest reputation via evident untruths. So Southampton is denigrated as posh and semi-rural because Winchester and the New Forest are nearby. A quick trip to St Mary’s or Thornhill should rectify this misapprehension. Portsmouth is alleged to be an insular island, yet has played the Blairite iconic architecture/urban regeneration game far more effectively, with its Spinnaker observation tower and glass skyscrapers forming an incongruously slick enclave in amongst the two-up-two-downs. Southampton’s ‘urban renaissance’ entailed nondescript retail and Barratt boxes. British cities’ perceptions of each other, when refracted through the compulsory agonism of a sporting rivalry, tend to get very skewed. On close investigation, these rivalries are usually built on myth, and are very recent. The Southampton–Portsmouth football rivalry began in the late 1960s, at the exact point that Colin Buchanan was charged by the Wilson government with developing a plan for the ‘Southampton–Portsmouth Supercity’. It could be argued that the Saints/Pompey hatred is what happened instead of this south coast megalopolis. Rather than a real modernity, we got dim-witted atavism—but one justified with recourse to the serious politics it effectively replaced.
There were two competing ideas about the Solent City: the grid proposed by Colin Buchanan, and the later proposals from a group of sociologists, architects and critics (Paul Barker, Reyner Banham, Peter Hall and Cedric Price, respectively) in Non-Plan—Experiment in Freedom, a once famous 1969 special in the magazine New Society, which advocated the removal of planning controls, using the Solent City as an exemplar. The enormous oil refinery at Fawley, which even now presents itself to the hillier parts of Southampton at night as a distant and beautiful neon-lit metropolis, was to be given extra son et lumière by the non-planners, while the space in between would be made up of festive spaces, caravans, instant cities springing up and then disappearing along the M27. Without any of the japery implied in the New Society writers’ suggestions, a Non-Plan is essentially what happened when Buchanan’s Solent City was abandoned. Appropriately, given Huhne’s disdain, Eastleigh exemplifies the sort of indeterminate space which Solent City would have occupied, and is indicative of what happened instead. The area likes to think of itself as a semi-rural Hampshire Arcadia, but with the exception of the New Forest this is far from the truth. Along with Gosport, the largest part of the conurbation that isn’t either Southampton or Portsmouth itself, Eastleigh is a small company town,
