had more urban than rural inhabitants. Even now, after a century of sentimentalism about the countryside, around 90 per cent of us live in essentially urban areas, and although around 70 per cent of the landmass is still agricultural land, only 300,000 people actually work it. This might be an urban island, but extraordinarily Penguin Books were able to release a set of twenty books in 2009 called English Journeys, in obvious reference to Priestley, every single one of which dealt with the countryside. The bulk of Priestley’s account was urban, this being where the overwhelming majority of the English lived. At the end of this survey of a country torn between north and south, rich and poor, Priestley listed three Englands that he had found on this journey, all of them embodied in their man-made structures. The first was the countryside, an area of patchwork fields and local stone, one which has ‘long since ceased to make its own living’, pretty in its desuetude, if over-preserved. The second was that of the Industrial Revolution, of iron, brick, smokestacks and back-to-backs, more ‘real’ than the first but ruthlessly inhumane towards its inhabitants. Last was a third, commercial world of arterial roads, Tudorbethan suburbia, art deco factories and cinemas; cheap and ersatz, but without the brutality of the second.
Since Priestley, we could add a fourth and fifth England, or rather a fourth or fifth Britain, as this book attempts to avoid what Tom Nairn calls ‘Englishry’. These are, respectively, the country of the postwar settlement, of council estates, Arndale centres and campus universities; and the post-1979 England of business parks, Barratt homes, riverside ‘stunning developments’, out-of-town shopping and distribution centres. This book is, at heart, an architectural guide to this country, to Britains four and five. It charts both the ambiguous remains of the fourth, and the fifth’s frequent determination to wipe out any architectural trace of it, just as it tries to decimate the remnants of its collectivist politics—and here I attempt to treat Britain five with much the same retrospective contempt as it shows its predecessor, largely for the reason that I find its neoliberal politics every bit as repugnant as it does those of its socialist forbear. This is not, however, a ruminative book about urbanism that touches on architecture to illustrate an argument, but one where architecture itself is central, much as it is in New Labour’s Change We See campaign. ‘By these stones shall we be judged’, said the leader of Vienna’s City Council in his opening speech for the Karl-Marx-Hof, the gigantic council estate that Austrian Fascists would bombard a year later. This book uses architecture in an unashamedly subjective fashion to illustrate politics and vice versa, and aims most of all to awake in the reader an attention to their urban environment, in the hope that they will see it as something consciously made, something formed, rather than as a more-or-less irritating backdrop to the daily commute, a possible investment or a series of monuments and eyesores. Finally, if this book does that, it is in the hope that from there, people can think about how they can consciously make and consciously transform their environment.
I will begin, then, with the environment that did most to shape me.
Chapter One
Southampton: Terminus City
‘I will begin, I said, where a man might first land, at Southampton.’ This is how J. B. Priestley opens English Journey, and so begin the accounts of sundry other English travellers from the Edwardian era up to the 1970s. Until Heathrow replaced it, Southampton was where most visitors or returning travellers entered the country. Now, however, the main entities to land at and depart from Southampton are consumer goods, manufactured in China, unloaded at the city’s Container Port, and freighted round the country by rail and lorry. What hasn’t changed about the town is the way it appeared to Priestley as something indistinct, something that wasn’t quite a place. ‘It had no existence in my mind as a real town, where you could buy and sell and bring up children; it existed only as a muddle of railway sidings, level crossings, customs houses and dock sheds; something to be done with as soon as possible’. Well, children are born there, and they do grow up there. I was, and I did. And things are most certainly bought and sold in Southampton.
Although this book is written in great suspicion of the New Labour strategy of regeneration via the ‘creative industries’ and the clawing back of municipal pride from Thatcherite under-development via sheds for sponsorship, relational aesthetics or ‘interactivity’, there is a hint—only a hint—of jealousy there. That is, jealousy that even though I may hate both the built result and its ideological legitimation, at least there is some kind of civic pride in places like Manchester or Gateshead, both on the part of their people and their architects and a sense that these cities are worth visiting for something above and beyond shopping. Southampton missed the meeting where the ‘urban renaissance’ was decided upon—perhaps because, despite being in the lower rungs of the twenty largest cities in Britain, it was never quite fully urban in the sense of being ‘civic’. Too southern and too surrounded by the Tory heartland for the poor-but-sexy cool by association of northern industrial cities; too close to London to attain an identity and culture of its own.
Even Southampton’s two Universities (one of which is a Russell Group research colossus) are so science-centric that the large student population doesn’t lead to any attendant artiness. Culture is regarded with suspicion within the M27, the motorway which encloses it and connects it to Portsmouth. Southampton is a thousand-year-old nowheresville. Yet this, after all, might be what distinguishes it. I used to be annoyed by the way that whenever my home town was mentioned in a work of art—from Lennon’s ‘Ballad of John and Yoko’ to Wyndham Lewis’s travelogue Snooty Baronet—they never said anything about the town itself. It was only as a place to pass through. Off the boat, onto the train and into Waterloo in one hour fifteen. Southampton was Heathrow before Heathrow, and has never quite known what to do with itself since the ship was succeeded by the jet. I was missing the point though: Southampton is the city as terminus. One of the few to have described what he saw when he arrived was ex-colonial boy J. G. Ballard, who wrote in his memoir Miracles of Life of his shocked first vision of England in 1946.
The Arrawa docked at Southampton, under a cold sky so grey and low that I could hardly believe this was the England I had read and heard so much about. Small, putty-faced people moved around, shabbily dressed and with a haunted air. Looking down from the rail, I noticed that the streets near the docks were lined with what seemed to be black perambulators, some sort of coal scuttle, I assumed, used for bunkering ships. Later I learned that these were British cars, a species I had never seen before.10
Then he’s straight off to London, never looking back.
The secret story of Southampton’s rise to (brief) prominence is deeply unnerving for those who like a city to be marked by the ambition of its architecture, or those who long for the South-East’s grip on the country to be loosened. In the early twentieth century, Southampton overtook Liverpool as Britain’s major passenger port. At exactly the point when Liverpool was erecting megacity monuments along the Pier Head, either to herald arrival at the centre of Empire or the grandeur of Liverpool itself, its business was being swiped by Southampton, with the White Star Line transferring there in 1907 and Cunard following in 1921. (Recently Liverpool has been threatening a belated revenge, with various cruise companies considering a move back to Merseyside, on the grounds that their passengers might want something to look at during their stop-off in England.) It is the misfortune of Southampton to have prospered most during the most uninspired period in British architectural history, the long slumber that lasted from 1914 to 1945. The shipping companies and Port Authorities built no Liver Building here, no ‘Graces’. Southampton didn’t make a distracting fuss about itself, and the provinces were not to get any more ideas above their station.
Southampton, like Coventry, Plymouth and east London, nearly became a non-place in a quite literal sense. In November 1940 the centre was flattened and thousands fled the city, many sleeping rough in the surrounding countryside to avoid returning to the inferno. Yet what happened when reconstruction came? Southampton is twinned with Le Havre, a French port that was similarly ruthlessly blitzed,
