have some good memories of this place in its form as a leisure complex, I’ll admit, and I find the Postmodernism of spectacle and geegaws somewhat preferable to that of vernacular, of Poundbury and woolly recreations of an imagined past—the Trocadero over New Urbanism.
The sole surviving dock building here used to lead into ‘Canute’s Pavilion’, a tacky mirror-glass mall which featured such joys as a humorous T-shirt shop, Edwardian arcade games and ice cream parlours. It also had a shop which sold nautical tat of various sorts, including a piece of coral onto which I fell as a child, gashing my arm and bleeding all over the ornaments for sale. Later, in the mid 1990s, the city council sponsored the building of an art house cinema, the Harbour Lights. It was a visual triumph, a dynamic little building that is quite possibly the only thing of any architectural worth built here between 1969 and 2009, and which made life here as a teenager much better than it would otherwise have been. After only around fifteen years of existence, Canute’s Pavilion was demolished. In its place is one of the few attempts here at the Urban Renaissance manner: two blocks, restaurants on the ground floor, three more shelved by the recession but masked by the ads, big meaningless bit of Public Art (a stern! Who knew?) in the middle, and preservation of the disused public transport tracks as ornaments.
The pornography of property is plastered across the building site. What sort of luxury is this, which seems predicated on the occupants of the flats being so permanently exhausted by their work that they need be infantilized, that they need to relax and be indulged in these secluded, ostentatiously calm places? Not to mention the question of what sort of luxury involves such minuscule proportions and such mean materials. Yet compared with the woeful vernacular architecture of the rest of the marina, I have to confess to feeling thankful that this at least resembles city architecture, and admit to preferring that central Southampton resemble aspirational, yuppified Leeds or Manchester than upper-crust Havant or Bursledon. This is one of the few ways in which Blairism is marginally, if almost imperceptibly preferable to its more straightforward precursor, Thatcherism. There is, however, no sense here of the freedoms of a city, while the marketing, based on exclusivity and seclusion, implies that these are suburbs in the guise of inner cities, as Jonathan Meades claims. That even the Urban Renaissance redesign of Ocean Village won’t stick in somewhere as doggedly suburban as south-east England is indicated by the unfinished nature of this already cheap project. But Southampton’s hold on urbanity is light, indefinite. It is liable to crumble at a touch.
Property propaganda, Ocean Village
Western Dock
The port is divided into leisure and utility. On the one hand you have the cruise ships, on the other containers, with nothing much (save the Isle of Wight ferry) between luxury and automation. I flick through the local Daily Echo and find that soon Southampton will briefly be home to the gargantuan Celebrity Eclipse, ‘a twenty-first century, 122,000-ton engineering marvel’—built of course in Germany rather than the defunct Soton shipyards and boasting, among other features, a golf course on its roof. Another cruise ship, in port on the day we took some of these pictures, apparently features a dining room where the tables and chairs are made from ice—you are recommended to wear warm clothing. These floating Dubais, placeless and opulent, transport the cruiser through (literally) nowhere. The other sort of ship is attended to largely by the ‘robots’, colossal semi-automated cranes, with their additional skeleton crew of bored humans.
You can see the cranes in the distance from Mayflower Park, a windswept public space laid out in the 1960s by the City Architects’ Department that is (officially) the only publicly accessible stretch of the harbour. Pre-financial crisis, it was the mooted location for Avery Associates’ Spitfire Wing, an observation tower intended to mimic the aerodynamic form of the plane designed in the city, the only proposal for the waterfront to conjure the ‘Bilbao Effect’—or as the Echo calls it, ‘the wow factor’—though it seemed a fairly transparent attempt at one-upmanship with Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower. An article in the same paper in October 2008 claimed that it had been replaced by the ‘woe factor’, as almost all the new projects that had been announced or had received planning permission were cancelled or shelved. Since then, a couple have limped their way to completion, presumably representing ‘green shoots’. In response to all this, Tory council leader Royston Smith commented that ‘Southampton’s golden age will just have to be put back a couple of years’.15 In Mayflower Park, the wait for the golden age entails the no doubt temporary survival of some strange and beautiful artefacts—two shelters by Leon Berger in rubble stone with jagged concrete roofs, a tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright, which seem an efficient shelter for the cider-drinking youth that gather there.
Mayflower Park
My dad often took me, my brother and sister to Mayflower Park, to enjoy its now demolished playground, which included a concrete maze, aptly enough. Being a child of the eighties I was fairly obsessed with robots, specifically Transformers. Mum likes to tell the story about me coming home from nursery school claiming we’d been told about ‘this robot called God’ (well, how else to explain it?), and on Mayflower Park I would dream of robots in disguise. I was missing a trick, as they were a few yards from the park, in the containerized Western Dock. This vast dock complex was built in the 1930s on reclaimed land, to take the evermore ginormous cruise ships of the era such as the Queen Mary. In the 1980s its vastness meant that, unlike Liverpool or London, it could accommodate containerization with ease. It’s also damn hard to see, at least from the Southampton side of the River Test, because you’re not meant to see it. It’s an incredible sight, but it’s never going to be on Southampton City Council’s Heritage itinerary—and unless you have a pass, you won’t ever see it up close. The cranes induce the morbid thrill of seeing our replacements.
Ships seen from Mayflower Park
The difficulty in seeing the port should not surprise overmuch, as for all the drastic changes in port cities over the last few decades, docks were always heavily guarded places. The London Docks used to have a gigantic wall to keep out those not on business, a barrier which now exists in a less tangible form in the financial district of Docklands. In Southampton the exclusion is yet more subtle in that although the docks seem to have little effect on the town, they still exist, and are (or rather were until the crash) thriving. I went to the city’s main comprehensive school, and nobody I knew had parents who worked on the docks. More often, their parents’ jobs derived from the service industry in the centre, or from the Russell Group university in the suburban north. Yet beginning at the centre of town and straggling its way along the inner-city district of Freemantle, past Millbrook and ending at the edge of the New Forest, is the major cruise port and the second largest container port in Britain. Its success, size and centrality are matched only by its invisibility.
There are few places where you can gain any sense of it, let alone at its full scale, unless you’re lucky enough to have a tower-block flat in Millbrook, Shirley or Redbridge. You could look from the other side of Southampton Water (I’ve never done so—there be dragons) or, more interestingly, there is a bridge and a pathway which begins at Millbrook Railway Station. This is itself a strange remnant, one of those stations which receive about one train an hour that miraculously survived the Beeching Axe. Were you walking from my Mum’s house in Freemantle, you could see the container port start to rise above the terraces and flats, its arcing cranes softened by the winter light. The cruel scale and drama of the cranes make everything around seem petty.
As you walk through Freemantle towards the docks, past the recently closed British American Tobacco
