settled by workers transferred from the works at Nine Elms, meaning that it was for a while a south London enclave in Hampshire, and I swear the accent, at least, survived until the 1990s. On moving aged twelve to a council estate within the Southampton boundaries, not only did I find the semis and front gardens suspiciously posh-looking, but I also thought the estate kids’ semi-yokel accent to be surprising and hilarious, which guaranteed me some perhaps slightly deserved kickings.
Fawley Refinery
Eastleigh Station
I suspect that by the 1950s Eastleigh had forgotten it was once a colony of London, and the gridiron plan was abandoned from the thirties onwards, so although incongruously dense at the centre it is mostly dispersed, exurban, straggling: the bleak reality of the libertarian promises of the Non-Plan which once aimed to turn the area into a discontinuous funfest. In walking distance from the centre is Southampton Airport, built on the site of an interwar camp for Jewish refugees midway from Eastern Europe to New York City—although this bit of history is seldom mentioned, lest it imply that Southampton was once not provincial, with a history based on transatlantic travel, migration and internationalism. Adjacent, The Lakes, an abandoned industrial site given its own railway and turned into a small pleasure park, carries perhaps a hint of Non-Plan in its conversion of brownfield into leisure. Eastleigh had its brief moment in the national news in the mid nineties when its Tory MP, Stephen Milligan, was found dead with orange in mouth, plastic bag on head and suspenders on legs. I recall BBC News visiting the town, an incredible, improbable breaking of telly into life.
Eastleigh Works
The London–Southampton train, which I’ve taken hundreds of times in the last eleven years, goes through Eastleigh in its last stretch, and hence through an enormous cargoscape of rusting vintage carriages and freight trains carrying Chinese containers, Southampton’s Ford Transit factory visible in the distance. So I remember seeing the bombed-out church, a place which to me always seemed incomparably ancient (I was so disappointed when I realized it was Victorian), restored in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a block of flats, improbably enough. It won an Evening Standard award for housing, and whether or not it was deconsecrated, the move from God to property seems highly symbolic. Some of what I remember is still there, but the inner streets—Cranbury Road, where I lived, Desborough, Chamberlayne, Derby Road, Factory Road—have a drinking ban in place to stop general ultraviolence from occurring in the residential area. It’s not hard to see why this might occur, as the place looks traumatized. Everyone looks ill, half the shops are charity shops (not wholly a bad thing, but nor is it a sign of great economic health), and the first conversation I hear when I sit down with my drink in the Wagon Works, on my first visit to the town centre in over a decade, begins: ‘Soon it’ll be an Islamic Republic … Enoch was right … still, there’ll never be rivers of blood ‘cos the English don’t have the guts.’ I remembered that when I grew up here most of my friends were second/third generation Asian, and I wondered, looking round town at all the white faces, whether they all escaped to the other side of the M27, or hopefully further than that.
It’s a bizarre leap to blame immigration for Eastleigh’s desuetude. I once came across someone describing Eastleigh as a Northern town lost in Hampshire, which is true in part (though certainly not at the super-affluent outskirts). It’s a very thorough bit of planning, and its buildings are a residue of first, Victorian civic culture—the town hall, the two-up-two-downs, the churches, the red-brick Gothic school—and later, something else, something perhaps promising transformation: the garden city estates outside the grid; the ‘Labour Party House’; The Comrades Club, which I’m amazed and pleased to see is still called The Comrades Club, though I suspect it’s a karaoke and real ale fest rather than a hotbed of agitprop theatre. The town was once a Labour stronghold, but boundary changes and drift meant that by the 1970s it was a Tory seat. My Dad tells me that the town once had the second highest Labour membership in the south of England (after Woolwich), but only because anyone who was on the ‘tote’, buying a ticket for the party-run pools from the Labour canvassers, became an automatic ‘member’. It’s hard to imagine any active politics there now, corrupt or otherwise, as it’s gone the way of most places of once-skilled labour—confused, lost, lumpen.
The place is planned for industry, very precisely. Railway Works at one end, Pirelli Cables factory at the other, with a grid of terraces in between and semis at the sides; more channelled and less ‘adaptable’ than any Modernist plan, although like all Victorian urbanism it’s seen as some sort of force of nature, the way things have always been, rather than something directed and planned for industrial, pecuniary purposes. As it is, all the industries I remember being here even in the early 1990s are now gone: the Mr Kipling factory from whence we got slabs of chocolate and the revelation that Tesco cakes were exactly the same as the Kipling cakes, the huge railway works, once one of the biggest in the country (as presumably there’s no demand for new trains in the botched, privatized railway network). Most alarming is the disappearance of the Pirelli factory; I remember it always just in the near distance, at the end of Factory Road. In its place are new Heritage Flats, with street names taken from the handful of famous residents: Joe Meek’s bleach blond boy, Heinz Burt from The Tornados, next to Benny Hill Close. Amusingly enough, there have been proposals to rename Factory Road because it gives the wrong impression of the place. At the centre of Eastleigh is what can only be described as a Socialist Realist sculpture depicting a railwayman, erected around the time the railway works was being closed down. Eastleigh is the truth of the arcadia Chris Huhne wants to save from ‘urban sprawl’. If Eastleigh has a history, it’s made up of grids, planning, towns appearing out of nowhere, industrialization and infrastructure, closely linked to the metropolis to the point of originally being inhabited by Londoners—but with its renamings and pseudo-Victorian architecture it tries to rewrite itself into a quaint little town, which it never actually was. The Solent City is nearer to the historical reality of this place than the bizarre village fantasies of Benny Hill Close.
Eastern Dock
Like the abortive Solent City, Southampton itself has two centres, or a centre and an ex-centre. The ex-centre is where you could almost believe that you were in a great port city rather than a failed, dead yachting and shopping town. It is centred on two ex-places: the former Southampton Terminus, closed by infamous 1960s Conservative rationalizer Dr Richard Beeching, and the Eastern Docks, where the Titanic set sail in 1912. Heritage Southampton is entirely obsessed with the Titanic, not for any good reason, but because it’s famous. The recently elected Tory Council had planned to sell off part of what is the City Art Gallery collection, one of the finest in non-metropolitan Britain, for the sake of creating a Titanic Museum in a ‘cultural quarter’ by the Civic Centre. Plans were laid to flog parts of a collection that features Picasso, Rodin, Blake, Flemish masters and Vorticists, Op Artists and Renaissance altarpieces, in favour of yet another attempt to drag tourists kicking and screaming to an increasingly provincial town. Thankfully, the council were (perhaps temporarily) deterred by a public campaign and a petition, which, while failing to sway the local press, found wide support outside of Southampton and among the city’s usually quiet intelligentsia. The planned Titanic Museum will still go ahead, using what are darkly described as ‘alternative sources’ of funding.
There is in fact a permanent exhibition about the Titanic in the Maritime Museum by the Eastern Docks. However, that’s in the ex-centre. The Civic Centre is far nearer to the WestQuay uber-mall and the Western Docks. The new Heritage Museum will include an Interactive Model of the Titanic, while the building entails a glass extension and remodelling
