and the only aesthetic response of any sort to the area’s extreme modernity—but like the cranes and containers it can’t be enjoyed unambiguously. Each is a weird combination of glaringly visible and hermetic, neither really wants to communicate anything much, and both are expressions of disconnection, of adjacent places appearing to be in different worlds. It’s a chaos of illegibility (which is no doubt dense with reference to the thirty or so people in the know), shout-outs to places in Lithuania and obscure portraits—and caveats aside, it’s wonderful. At the head of it all are the words, clear this time, ‘THE OUTLAWS CRU’. Big up The Outlaws Cru, whoever you are.
Boxes on boxes
Then another bridge, this time a rickety 1930s construction which once led from Freemantle to the docks, but now takes the lost pedestrian back to civilization of a sort. Around here you find bits of discarded clothing, and on the steps of the bridge, the single word ‘HELP’. The signs of life are horribly unnerving. A pair of women’s trousers, impaled on the spiked fences. A pair of unmatching shoes. They look like fragments from a rape, clues to a murder, something only accentuated by the sight of the containers just behind the trees. It can’t get much more sinister than this, and accordingly the passageway opens out and begins to resemble somewhere you could walk a dog without being dumped in the bushes, or without worrying about encountering strange temporal phenomena. Here, the container port’s cranes are no longer so visible, and the containers themselves take over—pile after pile after pile of them. Through the undergrowth a sign says ‘City’, and then the familiar city I know and love/hate comes into view—the ribbed-concrete tower of HSBC, the Brutalist stern of Wyndham Court, the clock tower of the Civic Centre on one side, and on the other the postmodernist horror show of the ‘Pirelli site’.
Shedscape
Southampton presents itself as a puzzle. Every time I go back I ask myself, ‘How did this happen?’ How did this city, by all accounts once the undisputed regional capital, get to the point where an entire stretch of its centre, as large as a small town, was given over to a gigantic retail park? How is it that this, the sixteenth largest city in the country, has the third highest level of violent crime and the third worst exam results, despite being at the centre of one of the country’s most affluent counties? And does any of this have anything to do with the fact that the city contains what was, when built, the largest urban mall in Britain?
In simple policy terms, these questions are easy enough to answer, and were extensively discussed by George Monbiot in Captive State. A large industrial site on reclaimed land became ‘open for development’ in the 1990s. The Labour council decided to designate it as a retail area at the same time as the rival inner-city retail centre of St Mary’s was ‘regenerated’ out of recognition, its shops demolished and its covered market torn down, leaving little more than a scattering of introverted student flats (in the vernacular, naturally). As this site was already easily accessed from the M27, the result is that the extremely affluent surrounding areas can get into the shopping malls easily and quickly, where they will find abundant parking space. Jobs For Local People are no doubt the stated aim, and the alibi for extremely profitable land deals. The result is a city devoid of any palpable civic pride, with a series of chain pubs where shops used to be, competing to sell the cheapest pints. I know how and why this all happened, but there’s more to this city, elements to it which suggest different things could have happened and indeed could still do so.
Mountbatten Retail Park
Leaving the deeply unprepossessing Southampton Central Station on its southern entrance, you can see the containers already, next to the grimy sheds of the Mountbatten Retail Park. The most immediately noticeable urban artefacts are the hotels. Hotels are, in my experience, the most reliably awful examples of British architecture built in the last thirty years, closely followed by the similar typology of Halls of Residence. Is this to do with some kind of national aversion to the concept of hospitality? Do their developers worry that architecture might deter custom? Or are they just unbelievably tight-fisted? This particular cluster of hotels was lucky enough to receive a specific denunciation from the hilarious, depressing weblog Bad British Architecture— a Novotel and an Ibis, similarly lumpen and blocky, aptly described by the blog’s writer the ‘Ghost of Nairn’ as ‘simply incompetent building, let alone design’. Its astounding crapness makes you wonder if there is a deliberate policy of discouraging cruise passengers from actually staying in the city. Across the road from them a Police Operational Command Unit is being erected to designs by multinational giants of shit Broadway Malyan. The site currently consists of a concrete frame and some brickwork, presumably to be In Keeping with something or other. There’s an onsite Christmas tree. This seasonal jollity is not continued by the police advertisements outside the station itself, which are all, rather staggeringly, about knives and knife crime, presenting those driving in from the M27 with another reason to avoid venturing any further than the malls.
The major dockside building is the Solent Flour Mills, which, remarkably enough, is still working. Equally remarkably, there have to my knowledge been no proposals to turn it into a lottery-funded art gallery. It’s absolutely huge, and of course inaccessible to the public. The dock gates were built around the same time in the early 1930s. The clocks have all had their hands removed. The most salient thing about industrial architecture after Fordism, the old form of industrial organization based on centralization, high wages, collective bargaining and intensive, linear mass production, is the changeover from an architecture of light to an architecture of windowless enclosure. The Solent Mills are a fine example of a Fordist ‘daylight factory’, notable as much for expanses of glass as for expanses of brick. Conversely, post-Fordist industry (there is such a thing—the presumption that post-Fordist automatically equals post-industrial is seldom correct) is marked by sheds without glass, where the ideology of transparency is transferred to financial capital and its shiny office blocks. Even Ford’s own Transit works in the suburbs are windowless, a 1990s steel box looming over the top-lit earlier factory buildings. The de-industrialization of Southampton (which happened in train with the intensified automation of the container port) means that there are few windowless industrial sheds in the centre of town. There are, however, windowless leisure sheds.
Solent Flour Mills
Ford showrooms, Shirley
The biggest of these is Leisure World, an ‘adaptive reuse’ of a former automated warehouse that in the late 1990s was transformed into a gigantic shed of entertainment: nightclubs, chain restaurants, and a multiplex, with lots and lots of car parking. The entrance is framed on one side by a casino, one of several in the centre, presumably intended for the cruise passengers; and on the other by ‘Quayside’, a simulacrum Victorian pub for an area which was under water in the Victorian era. The car park of Leisure World is one of the few places where certain of the dock’s architectural features reveal themselves—the cyclopean scale of the Flour Mills, for one, and for another, the pathetic tin canopy of the City Cruise Terminal. I spent much time walking round said car park with a camera, where I saw among other things that the nightclubs—formerly Ikon and Diva—are now called ‘Reykjavik Icehouse’ and ‘New York Disco’, perhaps in some partial memory of the thousands of New Yorkers who passed through this city in the first half of the last century. You will note the lack of photographs of any of these things. As I take a picture of the wavy roof of Ikea from behind the Leisure Container, a voice from behind me says ‘What do you think
