Eyre. It’ll also be the first time—after a housing scheme by Richard Rogers was recently rejected—that an architect of any note has built in the city (as opposed to its University) since the 1960s. The ‘cultural district’, a belated sop to something other than mammon in a city that is otherwise cravenly devoted to it, is planned to include a ‘mixed use’ block by once famous 1980s postmodernists CZWG, but so far the only part of the area where building has actually taken place involves the replacement of an international style block of the 1960s with an international style block of the 2000s, in an act of astounding pointlessness. The redevelopment of the (listed) interwar Civic Centre has annoyed the traditionalist likes of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ column, but as this stripped classical complex is already functionally little more than a roundabout flanked by offices and malls worthy of a business park in Fareham, the damage was done a long time ago. The suspicion that Wilkinson Eyre were hired because the councillors had seen their Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, rather than for the work they had produced elsewhere, is inescapable. No other towns really exist.
South Western Hotel
But get someone to drop you off at the old Terminus blindfolded, take off the blindfold, look around, and you could believe you were Somewhere. There’s a lush square ringed by stylish bow-windowed terraces, some Gin Palace-like Art Nouveau hotels, the handsome former station and, oddest of all, the South Western Hotel. Now—obviously—luxury flats, this was The Hotel Where The Titanic’s Passengers Stayed, a wonderfully ridiculous high-Victorian confection that would look at home in South Kensington. More interesting is the block adjacent, a 1920s extension of the hotel. It’s a freakish anomaly in the city, an example of hard Grosstadtarchitektur, eight storeys, minimal classical ornament: perhaps inspiration was taken from the thousands of New Yorkers who must have stayed here.
According entirely with the ‘Manhattanism’ described by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in his book Delirious New York, the South Western Hotel is an example of the ‘culture of congestion’, irrespective of its serene 1920s façade. Its skyline is never quite clean or precise, due to a series of accretions—first the 1870s hotel given its dramatic 1920s extension, then some more utilitarian extra storeys added during its successive uses as the local BBC headquarters between the 1960s and the 1990s, and its subsequent use as luxury flats, all creating an illegible jumble. Even on the Portland stone front of the 1920s extension, one corner abandons the classical symmetry, going off in its own utilitarian direction, leading to the seedy stock brick of the sides facing the train shed. It’s as if the metropolitan skyline the city otherwise lacked were incarnated solely in this building, dominating everything around it, especially from the raised vantage point of the 1970s Itchen Bridge. The South Western Hotel introduces into Southampton a robust urban scale that is replicated nowhere else in the town, with nothing taller (bar the Civic Centre clock tower) built for half a century. Its environs are one of the few places where you can get some idea of what the first skyscrapers might have been like, in that the two-storey surroundings are dominated by something four times their height, and nothing has really attempted to follow it in the immediate area, so it still suggests an imminent departure for somewhere more exciting, frozen in time. If the Terminus Station were reopened, then the city’s centre of gravity would be shifted from a gigantic retail park to a disparate, complex city, near to the depressed council estates of Northam, St Mary’s and Holy Rood, the (small but quite lovely) walled town, and some attempts at civic architecture courtesy of Cunard, White Star and the South-Western Railway. The station is now a casino.
The Titanic ought to be a bitter, painful memory for Southampton, because most of the crew—those who weren’t allowed into the lifeboats—were from the town, and most of them were from the slums of Northam. Their pay was cancelled immediately, and White Star gave no benefits or compensation, giving a clue as to why this Hampshire town became stridently red after World War One: a sudden shocking realization that, regardless of all that King and Country nonsense, the ruling class doesn’t care about you, a shock which has since dissipated into aiming to join the ruling class (think of the way early 2000s slick soulboy Craig David, hailing from the Holy Rood council estate, used to refer to himself in the third person, talking about himself as ‘Craig David the Brand’). Instead, this mass death is something we revel in, because it reminds us of Kate Winslet posing nude for Leonardo DiCaprio, or our heroes embracing atop the ship’s stern while Céline Dion warbles in the background. The Isle of Wight ferries depart from here, and were the focus of solidarity actions with the Vestas wind turbine factory occupation on the Island in 2009, a reminder that the city is not as defeated as it may first appear. The wonderfully silly Edwardian dock building adjacent is now Maxim’s Casino.
The area around the former eastern docks and the former Terminus is where most new residential development is concentrated. New Southampton looks much the same as New Everywhere Else, with the proviso that it took them a little while longer to cotton onto the pseudomodernist turn, so pitched roofs and ‘decorative’ banded brickwork continued here for longer than in other cities. It includes the ‘French Quarter’ (Southampton is lucky enough to have only one ‘Quarter’, aside from the aforementioned and as yet unbuilt Cultural Quarter), which contains a ‘Property Café’. Near to all this is a fifty-year-old attempt to design a new city district, the Holy Rood estate, designed to replace a slum bombed during World War Two. Designed by Lyons Israel Ellis, it has always seemed the poor relation to their later masterpiece, Wyndham Court.
By comparison, Holy Rood is a much more straightforward scattering of low and medium-rise Modernist blocks, using the soft-Brutalist vernacular of stock-brick and concrete. The interesting things about it come from the layout rather than the aesthetic, which is robust but not tectonically exciting. You pass under buildings, through courtyards and gardens. (You can’t drink there, as signs point out.) At one end, a piece of public art, an abstracted steel seaman carrying a ship, manages to be surprisingly good, providing a signpost for the place which doesn’t make it look institutional without going for the usual alternative of being brightly patronizing. The effects of aerial bombardment are visible on practically every corner round here, if you look hard enough, but Holy Rood Church is the most eloquent statement of it, a bombed-out church which was left in its ruined state as a memorial to the Merchant Navy. It has become a generalized memorial space, so there is a plaque dedicated to the dead of the Falklands War (rather grotesquely putting this dirty little war on the same level as the fight against Nazi Germany) as well as an earlier memorial to the Titanic.
Holy Rood Estate
Near here is the original Eastern Dock, the one from which the Titanic (and all the other ships that didn’t sink) sailed, the place to where Cunard and White Star moved their offices from Liverpool. In the 1980s the dock was transformed into ‘Ocean Village’, a combined marina, business park and leisure complex. The name itself implies what was supposed to happen to this area of the city. I tend to think that a place which builds something like the South Western Hotel, or Wyndham Court, or even the 1930s Civic Centre, is not a village, nor even a town, but a city. Evidently the City Council disagreed. The Art Deco Ocean Terminal was flattened to build Ocean Village, and the most recent building here is a car park in neo-deco style, as if in some kind of act of repentance. Surrounding it are the local bank HQs, all designed in a business-park style that is a fine reminder of why the period between the late 1970s and the 1990s is currently as much loathed by architectural fashion as the 1940s to 1960s period was previously, aside from mere knee-jerk reaction. What is so depressing about this place is the way that the formal return of decoration, and the use of traditional materials and pitched roofs that was then called ‘vernacular’, is paralleled by an alienating, anti-pedestrian approach to planning inherited from Modernism’s worst aspects. It is basically a series of surface car parks with buildings in between, rather than vice versa. All the jollity, the stained glass, the patterns and the pediments appear as pathetic attempts
