A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Owen Hatherley

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 to distract the driver or pedestrian from the alienating newness of the landscape. I do 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,