Читать книгу A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain - Owen Hatherley - Страница 12

‘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, yet Auguste Perret’s reconstruction of that city as a series of neoclassical towers and boulevards was, while by no means fearlessly Modernist, confident, contemporary, urban, large-scaled, proud. Southampton got a one-storey Portland Stone shopping parade, now featuring the faded imprints of 1990s shop signs, since the shops have almost all moved into the city’s newly-built covered malls. The planners of Le Havre might have cast covetous glances across the Atlantic at the US’s skyscrapers and daylight factories, but those of 1940s Southampton recognized that the future lay somewhere else in the United States. In The Buildings of England, David Lloyd described the parade as being akin to ‘an up-and-coming Mid-Western town with planning control and Portland stone’. While the gigantic ships, those ribbon-windowed beauties that inspired a million Modernist buildings, sailed to New York from just a few yards away, Southampton channelled the spirit of Iowa.

Holy Rood Church

A ghost McDonalds, Above Bar

Shirley Towers

However, Southampton City Council took a thirty-year detour before realizing in the 1990s that Southampton’s destiny was to be the most American city in Britain, in the least glamorous possible sense. In Soft City, an early psychogeographic study marked by a very early 1970s paranoia, Jonathan Raban accidentally found himself in a standard exemplar of the British transformation of Corbusian utopia into dystopia. A planned satellite suburb on the edges of Southampton, a ‘vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people’, Millbrook seemed to be the perfect embodiment of well-meaning failure, producing an isolated and disturbing new landscape. Architecturally, Millbrook is not too bad—the towers, especially, by the Tyneside firm Ryder & Yates, are clever, patterned things—but in terms of planning it’s as desolate now as it no doubt was in 1974, and the pitched roofs on the lower blocks don’t lessen the effect; today they’re as disconnected as ever. Millbrook Towers, the tallest building in the city placed bizarrely in its outer suburbs, may be an elegant building, but doubtless that was little consolation to its inhabitants when recently the lifts were out of action for eight months.¹¹ Raban concludes: ‘were one to read Millbrook as a novel, one might say that the author had read and copied all the fashionable books without understanding them, and had produced a typical minor work in which all the passions and prejudices of the current masterpieces were unconsciously and artlessly reflected.’¹²

Appropriately, the work of the city architect who planned Millbrook—Leon Berger, a Modernist trained in Liverpool and perhaps intent on applying some of its architectural ambition to its rival—is indeed a sort of amalgam of the period’s motifs and clichés, applied with some wit, occasional panache and more occasionally, real talent. Zeilenbau (‘line-building’, a rationalist plan popularized at the Bauhaus in the 1920s) arrangements of disconnected blocks in open space at the estates on the eastern edges like Weston Shore or Thornhill; mixed development everywhere else, containing some or all of béton brut, rubble stone, weather-boarding, bare stock brick, slabs and points in varying quantities. Yet Millbrook’s bleakness coincided with some extraordinary architecture.

Just outside the Central Station is Wyndham Court, designed in 1966 for the City Council by Lyons Israel Ellis, a firm that acted as finishing school for the more famous New Brutalist architects of the period like James Stirling, architect of the Leicester Engineering Building among others. Listed in the 1990s against knee-jerk opposition from the local press, this is by far the finest twentieth-century building in the city. Without employing the easy formal references that mark the city’s post-1979 shopping centres and flats, it immediately evokes the cruise behemoths that sailed from the nearby port. A glorious concrete Cunard, impossible to ignore, moored in a city otherwise intent that nobody should notice it—and it’s still, as the satellite dishes imply, a functioning block of social housing, which would be unlikely now in London or Manchester. It clearly hasn’t been cleaned in a very long time, and as Joel, gobsmacked, takes several photos, two youths shout over at us, in the fast Estuary/Yokel hybrid that is the Sotonian accent, ‘Itwasn’tmyfaultmydaddidn’tknowjohnniesbroke!’ His urbane Bradfordian sensibilities offended, he asks ‘Can you translate from the vernacular?’, unable to imagine that they’ve been apologizing to us for their very existence. Adjacent is a small bomb site-cum-park, redbrick stumps of buildings, benches, rats and bristling vegetation.

Wyndham Court

Southampton had long been one of the best British candidates for a Ville Radieuse. Victorian planning created The Avenue, a tree-lined boulevard that ran all the way to the ‘Gateway to Empire’, a series of central parks; while the interwar years saw the building of the cohesive, verdant garden estates designed by the Quaker architect Herbert Collins. Collins’s little Letchworths in the northern suburbs were inadequately emulated by the city council in the form of the inept Flower Estate adjacent to the university, its ‘workers’ cottages’ and treeless streets the incongruous setting for perhaps the nastiest of its wide variety of nasty places. This is a place of which I have particularly bitter memories, having lived there as a teenager: most of what I remember is ubiquitous casual violence, something especially fearsome in ‘Daisy Dip’, the estate’s little park, where a friend was baseball-batted for dyeing his hair.

Unlikely as it may seem for a town in Hampshire, Southampton is remarkably violent: Home Office statistics in 2008 listed it as Britain’s third ‘most dangerous city’, with more violent acts per population than anywhere else other than Manchester and Sheffield, both far larger cities.¹³ Much of this violence seems connected to a town vs gown divide in a city where the smug, affluent gown meets a chronically depressed town. Someone in Liverpool once impressed upon me that the difference between these two one-time transatlantic ports, the thing that makes the smaller of them the more brutal, is the lack of sentiment and civic pride. Liverpool has a whole mythology, however dewy-eyed, of its own importance and civic munificence; Southampton knows it fucking hates Portsmouth but proclaims very little else about itself. At a stretch, perhaps, it is proud of being the embarkation point of the ‘world’s biggest metaphor’ in 1912, and the former home of Matthew Le Tissier, England’s most underrated footballer.

It was not always so mediocre; sometimes the Southampton built in the 1950s and 1960s could be positively dramatic. Leon Berger’s work took ‘mixed development’ to an occasionally preposterous extreme. A one-storey house next to a three-storey block of flats next to an eighteen-storey tower, Berger’s Shirley Estate exemplifies what is striking about this architecture. I used to look at this place with some awe as a teenager, Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’ running round in my head. This is appropriate, as Polish is now heard almost as often in Shirley as English, in a town which has always had a large Eastern European contingent—I propose a twinning of Służew and Thornhill. In winter, the tower is shrouded in mist, as if it were a mirage. None of the gardens are private, which we’re now supposed to think is a bad thing, and the tower is simply enormous, nearly as wide as it is tall, infilled with panels of rubble as if to evoke the medieval town centre. There are three of these, in Shirley, Redbridge and St Mary’s, and from an elevated point they become beacons in this sprawling, low-rise city, seeming to point to somewhere out of here.

The buildings the council didn’t sponsor, those in the marvellously named central strip Above Bar and its environs, are in the style recently and amusingly described by Stephen Bayley as ‘John Lewis Modernism’, here at its most nondescript. When containerization and Heathrow destroyed Southampton’s raison d’être, it gradually realized its future was to become Hampshire’s Shopping Extravaganza, dragging the burghers of the New Forest, Romsey, Winchester et al. into the city to buy stuff. The city went through several drafts and false starts before it finally succeeded in its aims with the gigantic WestQuay in the twenty-first century. Draft One: East Street Shopping Centre, designed in the late 1960s. Nobody comes here. I can’t remember anyone ever coming here. It adjoins a huge concrete office block, the Capital Tower, which is architecturally undistinguished but has a classic Brutalist escape staircase offsetting the mediocrity of the rest. Its apparatus of ramps and car parks cuts the centre off from the inner city and from St Mary’s, the district that is Southampton’s beating heart (currently more of a pacemaker). I recently found a copy of Le Corbusier’s The Modulor in East Street Oxfam. It seemed apt.

East Street Shopping Centre

East Street, actually placed in (or rather terminating) a street, and adjoining a tall, hard building, was clearly not sufficiently suburban. Draft Two, built in the early nineties: the postmodernist mall of the Bargate Centre sited next to the titular Bargate itself, an ‘iconic’ medieval remnant, and designed by the prolific and hopelessly mediocre local architects W. H. Saunders. In Southampton even ‘alternative’ culture happens in shopping malls, and the Bargate found its niche in the late 1990s by catering to ravers, skaters, Goths and metallers rather than the original targets of tourists, children and their harassed parents. The medieval walls, and flats used by the council for emergency housing, sit at the Bargate Centre’s edges.

The Bargate is one of four big malls in the city centre. On the outskirts Eastleigh, a former railway works with houses attached, adds another, the Swan Centre. It’s now being redesigned in a metallic, vaguely deconstructivist manner, indicating that its bricky Postmodernism has been thoroughly superseded as the architecture of retail. I used to live right next to this mall, which swept away Victorian market streets, much to my joy. As a child I loved malls. We never used that Americanism (these were the more prosaic Shopping Centres), but I had a birthday in McDonalds with branded party hats and gifts, I ate Donuts and Deep Pan Pizza, and as adolescence hit I listlessly read magazines in WH Smith until I was thrown out. I was glad when I realized there was a word, loitering, for this pastime.

Upon moving into the city proper, my affections were transferred to the Marlands, Draft Three of the Sotonian Mall, which replaced a bus station (the city hasn’t had this basic amenity in decades) and encased under fibreglass a fragment of the Victorian street it replaced, eating it up as a gesture of genuflection to complement the atrocious, grinning stone-clad façade. The Marlands nearly went bankrupt, but was transformed into the expressively named ‘The Mall’, where it now reaches a canopy out into some bland postwar blocks. Linked by a walkway at the back—traversing a site 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.