steel arms hovering derisively over Salt & Battery Fish & Chips. The disassociation of industry and architecture after Modernism is spectacularly visible along the Western Docks, as most of the architecture built after the container port was established in 1969 is in the vernacular. Looking out onto the industrial cyber-architecture of the port, the flats and houses are utterly absurd, architecture placing its hands over its ears and eyes. Nothing has even attempted to exploit the drama of this place, which is again unsurprising, I suppose, as container ports are not seen as part of the city itself. Mostly they stand in out-of-the-way places like Felixstowe or Tilbury, rather than near the centre of medieval cities. So, there is only one way. You climb up the frighteningly unstable-seeming motorway bridge which leads to Millbrook station, and from here, equipped with zoom lens and/or binoculars, the port reveals itself at nearly its full extent. The neglect of the place is clear enough from the foliage that has draped itself around the concrete and steel of the station bridges, a mutant nature which is particularly virulent round here.
Walter Benjamin differentiated Communist Constructivist aesthetics from Fascist Futurist aestheticism by pointing out that the latter were merely interested in the look of technology, and had little interest in finding out how it worked, in mastering and applying it—it was instead a subject for a kind of technological nature painting. I don’t know how this port complex works, but I find it almost convulsively beautiful. Although my intent here is to examine what happens to a place when something like this is in its midst, it is important to work out how the port functions, to explain the networks of trade and power that keep it going. Here I can offer some minimal information, but not much else. Southampton Container Port is officially known as ‘DP World Southampton’. It is 51 per cent owned by DP World, which is itself owned by Dubai World, the insolvent state-run conglomerate. The other 49 per cent is owned by Associated British Ports, denationalized in the early 1980s and now largely owned by Goldman Sachs. That these institutions would have little interest in Southampton itself is again deeply unsurprising. Dubai World rationalized the port still further throughout the 2000s, introducing more automation and decimating the already tiny workforce. Their unimportance to the operation can be gleaned from the several industrial accidents at the container port over the last couple of years. In July 2009 one worker’s legs were crushed by a crane, and in March 2010 a 200ft crane collapsed, narrowly avoiding claiming any further victims.16
DP World Southampton, from Millbrook Station
Rather than being introduced in one confrontational Thatcherite stroke, containerization and the destruction of Southampton dock labour was gradual, until after a few decades robots practically outnumbered dockers. How to respond to these cranes, then—these complex, almost autonomous creatures, operated (or not) by something fleshy in their interior? How could we possibly have fought them? They promise a true liberation from work, one of the most visible pieces of evidence for the genuine possibility of an automated labour replacing us and letting us fish in the afternoon, philosophize in the evening and so forth. Yet instead servile service industry work replicated—needlessly, pointlessly—the old structure of forty hours (plus) a week and a pay cheque, this time with fewer rights, less bargaining power. How could we have used the robots?
We might at least have done something more interesting with them than this. The port transports cars, it transports consumer goods manufactured in the Special Economic Zones of the People’s Republic of China, and it piles up waste and scrap; the literal embodiment of an overwhelming sense of waste, both political and actual. The port is one of the main importers of cars into the UK, and it transports some of the few made here out of the country—the Ford Transit, made in the north of the city in a factory threatened with closure throughout 2009, and whose workers took industrial action in sympathy with the Visteon–Ford occupiers in Enfield and Ireland. These views of the car port half empty may be a portent of the obsolescence of that particular form of locomotion, which looks rather antiquated when seen as a component part of this triumph of blank, rectilinear automation—the freight trains seem to slot into it far more neatly. But we cheated here by taking photographs soon after Christmas 2009, in what was no doubt a fallow period even by the standards of the deepest recession in British history. Assembled together according to type, they looked surreal, Lilliputian: three red cars all in a line, waiting to be transported around the country.
Walking down the steps of Millbrook Station’s railway bridge brings you to the passageway. It’s incredibly thin and overgrown, and it continues for around a mile to the Central Station. This pathway has at one side the motorway which runs alongside the port, on the other the railway line, so it is bordered on each side by metal fences, topped with barbed wire on the port side. The view of the cruise ship Oriana, through the barbed wire or otherwise, exemplifies how Southampton works rather neatly, with hidden, untouchable luxury amidst general meanness. The Oriana was built in Germany by P&O in the mid 1990s. Apparently, the original intention was to build it in the UK but no shipyard capable of such a feat survives … There’s something rather comic about the contrast between the sleek Corbusian melodrama of a cruise ship and the self-effacing container ships. In the former, superfluous luxury is massive and bombastic; in the latter, a vast amount of consumer cargo is contained in a seemingly small, undramatic space. The path is not blocked off, so in principle this is a public right of way, and I’ve seen other people walking it—but there are pylons in its midst, which you could touch, were you to throw caution to the wind. Like everything else here, greenery takes over as much as it possibly can, creeping up the pylons themselves. Nearby, crows and robins are irritated to have their calm disturbed. Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 is advertised across the road, and modern warriors depart for Iraq and Afghanistan from Marchwood, over Southampton Water.
The Oriana
Cars at the container port
Modern warfare
In fact, this path used to be parkland, a green hinterland created between the 1930s docks and the Victorian housing, which implies that once this was considered a spectacle worth seeing. Halfway along the path the passageway is traversed by the motorway, in the form of a tight, oblique-angled overpass, leaving a triangular sheltered space. This space has some kind of lake inside it, a puddle deep enough to make it enormously unpleasant if one is not wearing wellingtons, as the mud and vague, indeterminate pollution coalesce into a viscous, soupy gloop. But here there is evidence that this passageway is enormously prized, at least by some—a series of planks have been laid across it, forming a precarious but usable bridge, as tentative and partial as the concrete bridge above it is solid and certain.
Outlaws Cru
Messages of some sort or another
The reason for all of this soon becomes clear. It has become a canvas for Southampton’s graffiti artists. Tagging usually seems a drab micro-egotism, cliquey territorial pissing never aimed at the buildings that really deserve it—but here they’ve done something spectacular. Not by recourse to Banksy-style ‘subversion’, but seemingly from being in a secluded (though for the passing trains, extremely prominent) space, obscure enough and far enough from surveillance to be able to work on tags long enough to render them as lurid, jagged works of temporary art, blaring purples, greens and oranges. Dazzle
