A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Owen Hatherley
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that dramatically slopes down to what was once the waterfront—to car parks and an Asda, the Marlands was the first strike in the transformation of a huge swathe of reclaimed land into the aforementioned up and coming (or by now, down and out) Mid-Western town, after Leon Berger’s failed attempts at designing a coherent city. A huge site once occupied by a cable works and a power station was, in the late 1990s, turned into a series of strip malls and boxes. As it went up, curtain-walled office blocks went down, wrapped in plastic like Laura Palmer before being thrown into the sea. Then came the strip malls of Western Esplanade, then some rather functionalist car parks, then the vast WestQuay, the retail behemoth for which the others were merely unsuccessful drafts—and to which we will return later. Southampton today is an experiment, exurban America without the sun or the space.
In Search of Solent City
In 2008 the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh and failed leadership candidate Chris Huhne condemned proposals for the building of thousands of new homes in his constituency.14 This, he claimed, was merely the return after several decades of the ‘Solent City’, which would destroy the local identity of such distinctive, delightful places as Chandler’s Ford, Havant, Paulsgrove and Locks Heath. In the local press this was reported as if everyone would know what the Solent City was, and why it was such a bad thing. Solent City was a mid-1960s proposal by the Harold Wilson government for a new metropolis. It would be made up of Southampton and Portsmouth with a Milton Keynes-style grid-planned linear city strung between the two towns, uniting them into one of the largest and most powerful cities in the country and creating for the first time in centuries a southern city which could resist the pull of London. The Solent City never came to pass, but perhaps its phantom persists in the myths the area tells about itself. The Southampton–Portsmouth war via football, which has caused full-scale riots at least twice in the past decade, says a surprising amount about politics and culture in this unglamorous bit of Southern England. As a Sotonian with family from Portsmouth and Fareham, I don’t quite have the requisite visceral hatred for Pompey that is customary (although I should point out here I don’t go as far as my Grandma, who always claimed to ‘support both’). In any case, what is really interesting in the rivalry is that the alleged historical and political reasons for the intense mutual hatred have been imposed post-facto. For instance, Portsmouth supporters have always claimed that their chosen insult, ‘scum’, comes from ‘Southampton Corporation Union Men’, in reference to a dock strike allegedly broken by Southampton dockers in the 1930s. As Southampton is a commercial port and Portsmouth a military one, this is of course implausible, and I’ve never come across a reference to it in histories of either city outside of the abundant literature of the footballing rivalry itself.
The significance of the rivalry is that both of these cities, in relatively apolitical parts of the country, justify their sporting hatreds largely through reference to history (mutual enmity between military and civilian England) and left-wing politics (through imaginary breaches of working-class solidarity). The two cities like to vie for the roughest reputation via evident untruths. So Southampton is denigrated as posh and semi-rural because Winchester and the New Forest are nearby. A quick trip to St Mary’s or Thornhill should rectify this misapprehension. Portsmouth is alleged to be an insular island, yet has played the Blairite iconic architecture/urban regeneration game far more effectively, with its Spinnaker observation tower and glass skyscrapers forming an incongruously slick enclave in amongst the two-up-two-downs. Southampton’s ‘urban renaissance’ entailed nondescript retail and Barratt boxes. British cities’ perceptions of each other, when refracted through the compulsory agonism of a sporting rivalry, tend to get very skewed. On close investigation, these rivalries are usually built on myth, and are very recent. The Southampton–Portsmouth football rivalry began in the late 1960s, at the exact point that Colin Buchanan was charged by the Wilson government with developing a plan for the ‘Southampton–Portsmouth Supercity’. It could be argued that the Saints/Pompey hatred is what happened instead of this south coast megalopolis. Rather than a real modernity, we got dim-witted atavism—but one justified with recourse to the serious politics it effectively replaced.
There were two competing ideas about the Solent City: the grid proposed by Colin Buchanan, and the later proposals from a group of sociologists, architects and critics (Paul Barker, Reyner Banham, Peter Hall and Cedric Price, respectively) in Non-Plan—Experiment in Freedom, a once famous 1969 special in the magazine New Society, which advocated the removal of planning controls, using the Solent City as an exemplar. The enormous oil refinery at Fawley, which even now presents itself to the hillier parts of Southampton at night as a distant and beautiful neon-lit metropolis, was to be given extra son et lumière by the non-planners, while the space in between would be made up of festive spaces, caravans, instant cities springing up and then disappearing along the M27. Without any of the japery implied in the New Society writers’ suggestions, a Non-Plan is essentially what happened when Buchanan’s Solent City was abandoned. Appropriately, given Huhne’s disdain, Eastleigh exemplifies the sort of indeterminate space which Solent City would have occupied, and is indicative of what happened instead. The area likes to think of itself as a semi-rural Hampshire Arcadia, but with the exception of the New Forest this is far from the truth. Along with Gosport, the largest part of the conurbation that isn’t either Southampton or Portsmouth itself, Eastleigh is a small company town, planned as a complete entity in the late nineteenth century for the South-Western Railway. It was 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