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 Raban concludes: ‘were one to read Millbrook as a novel, one might say that the author had read and copied all the fashionable books without understanding them, and had produced a typical minor work in which all the passions and prejudices of the current masterpieces were unconsciously and artlessly reflected.’12
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,
