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the UK, and it transports some of the few made here out of the country—the Ford Transit, made in the north of the city in a factory threatened with closure throughout 2009, and whose workers took industrial action in sympathy with the Visteon–Ford occupiers in Enfield and Ireland. These views of the car port half empty may be a portent of the obsolescence of that particular form of locomotion, which looks rather antiquated when seen as a component part of this triumph of blank, rectilinear automation—the freight trains seem to slot into it far more neatly. But we cheated here by taking photographs soon after Christmas 2009, in what was no doubt a fallow period even by the standards of the deepest recession in British history. Assembled together according to type, they looked surreal, Lilliputian: three red cars all in a line, waiting to be transported around the country.

      Walking down the steps of Millbrook Station’s railway bridge brings you to the passageway. It’s incredibly thin and overgrown, and it continues for around a mile to the Central Station. This pathway has at one side the motorway which runs alongside the port, on the other the railway line, so it is bordered on each side by metal fences, topped with barbed wire on the port side. The view of the cruise ship Oriana, through the barbed wire or otherwise, exemplifies how Southampton works rather neatly, with hidden, untouchable luxury amidst general meanness. The Oriana was built in Germany by P&O in the mid 1990s. Apparently, the original intention was to build it in the UK but no shipyard capable of such a feat survives … There’s something rather comic about the contrast between the sleek Corbusian melodrama of a cruise ship and the self-effacing container ships. In the former, superfluous luxury is massive and bombastic; in the latter, a vast amount of consumer cargo is contained in a seemingly small, undramatic space. The path is not blocked off, so in principle this is a public right of way, and I’ve seen other people walking it—but there are pylons in its midst, which you could touch, were you to throw caution to the wind. Like everything else here, greenery takes over as much as it possibly can, creeping up the pylons themselves. Nearby, crows and robins are irritated to have their calm disturbed. Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 is advertised across the road, and modern warriors depart for Iraq and Afghanistan from Marchwood, over Southampton Water.

      The Oriana

      

      Cars at the container port

      Modern warfare

      In fact, this path used to be parkland, a green hinterland created between the 1930s docks and the Victorian housing, which implies that once this was considered a spectacle worth seeing. Halfway along the path the passageway is traversed by the motorway, in the form of a tight, oblique-angled overpass, leaving a triangular sheltered space. This space has some kind of lake inside it, a puddle deep enough to make it enormously unpleasant if one is not wearing wellingtons, as the mud and vague, indeterminate pollution coalesce into a viscous, soupy gloop. But here there is evidence that this passageway is enormously prized, at least by some—a series of planks have been laid across it, forming a precarious but usable bridge, as tentative and partial as the concrete bridge above it is solid and certain.

      Outlaws Cru

      

      Messages of some sort or another

      The reason for all of this soon becomes clear. It has become a canvas for Southampton’s graffiti artists. Tagging usually seems a drab micro-egotism, cliquey territorial pissing never aimed at the buildings that really deserve it—but here they’ve done something spectacular. Not by recourse to Banksy-style ‘subversion’, but seemingly from being in a secluded (though for the passing trains, extremely prominent) space, obscure enough and far enough from surveillance to be able to work on tags long enough to render them as lurid, jagged works of temporary art, blaring purples, greens and oranges. Dazzle painting.

      It’s magnificent, exhilarating, 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