Читать книгу A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain - Owen Hatherley - Страница 16

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 the deeply unprepossessing Southampton Central Station on its southern entrance, you can see the containers already, next to the grimy sheds of the Mountbatten Retail Park. The most immediately noticeable urban artefacts are the hotels. Hotels are, in my experience, the most reliably awful examples of British architecture built in the last thirty years, closely followed by the similar typology of Halls of Residence. Is this to do with some kind of national aversion to the concept of hospitality? Do their developers worry that architecture might deter custom? Or are they just unbelievably tight-fisted? This particular cluster of hotels was lucky enough to receive a specific denunciation from the hilarious, depressing weblog Bad British Architecture— a Novotel and an Ibis, similarly lumpen and blocky, aptly described by the blog’s writer the ‘Ghost of Nairn’ as ‘simply incompetent building, let alone design’. Its astounding crapness makes you wonder if there is a deliberate policy of discouraging cruise passengers from actually staying in the city. Across the road from them a Police Operational Command Unit is being erected to designs by multinational giants of shit Broadway Malyan. The site currently consists of a concrete frame and some brickwork, presumably to be In Keeping with something or other. There’s an onsite Christmas tree. This seasonal jollity is not continued by the police advertisements outside the station itself, which are all, rather staggeringly, about knives and knife crime, presenting those driving in from the M27 with another reason to avoid venturing any further than the malls.

The major dockside building is the Solent Flour Mills, which, remarkably enough, is still working. Equally remarkably, there have to my knowledge been no proposals to turn it into a lottery-funded art gallery. It’s absolutely huge, and of course inaccessible to the public. The dock gates were built around the same time in the early 1930s. The clocks have all had their hands removed. The most salient thing about industrial architecture after Fordism, the old form of industrial organization based on centralization, high wages, collective bargaining and intensive, linear mass production, is the changeover from an architecture of light to an architecture of windowless enclosure. The Solent Mills are a fine example of a Fordist ‘daylight factory’, notable as much for expanses of glass as for expanses of brick. Conversely, post-Fordist industry (there is such a thing—the presumption that post-Fordist automatically equals post-industrial is seldom correct) is marked by sheds without glass, where the ideology of transparency is transferred to financial capital and its shiny office blocks. Even Ford’s own Transit works in the suburbs are windowless, a 1990s steel box looming over the top-lit earlier factory buildings. The de-industrialization of Southampton (which happened in train with the intensified automation of the container port) means that there are few windowless industrial sheds in the centre of town. There are, however, windowless leisure sheds.

Solent Flour Mills

Ford showrooms, Shirley

The biggest of these is Leisure World, an ‘adaptive reuse’ of a former automated warehouse that in the late 1990s was transformed into a gigantic shed of entertainment: nightclubs, chain restaurants, and a multiplex, with lots and lots of car parking. The entrance is framed on one side by a casino, one of several in the centre, presumably intended for the cruise passengers; and on the other by ‘Quayside’, a simulacrum Victorian pub for an area which was under water in the Victorian era. The car park of Leisure World is one of the few places where certain of the dock’s architectural features reveal themselves—the cyclopean scale of the Flour Mills, for one, and for another, the pathetic tin canopy of the City Cruise Terminal. I spent much time walking round said car park with a camera, where I saw among other things that the nightclubs—formerly Ikon and Diva—are now called ‘Reykjavik Icehouse’ and ‘New York Disco’, perhaps in some partial memory of the thousands of New Yorkers who passed through this city in the first half of the last century. You will note the lack of photographs of any of these things. As I take a picture of the wavy roof of Ikea from behind the Leisure Container, a voice from behind me says ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I get out my NUJ Press Pass, which says on the back that the Police Federation recognizes me as a ‘bona fide news gatherer’. ‘That’s nice,’ he says when I get out the card. ‘But have you got permission?’ ‘What, to take photos in a car park?’ ‘This is private property. You have to have permission.’ He then makes me delete the photographs I took in the car park from the digital camera, one by one, before I am allowed out onto the ‘street’.

Leisure World

Quayside Pub

Castle House vs the De Vere

Except there is no street here. This whole gigantic site is designed solely for the car, so my being a pedestrian is already suspicious, impeccably white and well-spoken though I may be. There are two recent buildings as part of this spreading mass of shed: one for Ikea, which includes some public art on the wooden spirals of its car park; and another for cruise operator Carnival, which, with its high-tech cribbings, is almost a work of architecture, although not a work of urban architecture—it’s another business park building that is, somehow, literally yards from a medieval walled town. Similarly un-shed-like is the 1994 De Vere Grand Harbour Hotel (‘a shit-brown postmodern Brunswick Centre with a big glass pyramid fucked into it’, says Bad British Architecture, marvellously¹⁷). I’ve long thought this a risible, ridiculous building, but somehow in the context of blank, deathly sheds it seems to have at least some ambition, some statement of place and clumsy grandeur—and surely better a failed, ridiculous grandiosity than the utterly grim utilitarianism of the other city hotels. Behind the De Vere is a different conception of civic grandiosity, Eric Lyons’s Castle House. Better known for his private housing, Lyons designed here a powerful council tower block, detailed precisely in stone, concrete and wood. On the last of the walks where these photos were taken, it was being reclad with green glass and UPVC, a material which housing expert Sam Webb claimed had proven to be lethal in tower blocks at the Lakanal House fire in Camberwell.¹⁸ Regardless, it’s the cheapest and easiest way to dress a tower, whether a former president of the RIBA designed it or not. The assumption seems to be that its original fabric is automatically worthless, irrespective of it being considered ‘the finest tower in the south’ as late as the 1980s.¹⁹

WestQuay hinterland

But this is all really just leading up to Building Design Partnership’s enormous WestQuay mega-mall, the main occupant of the former Pirelli site. I’ve often avoided it gingerly, taken routes that circumvent it. I don’t like it, obviously, but the language that is used to attack it is remarkably similar to that which is used to attack some of the architecture I love. It’s out of scale, it’s too monumental, it’s fortress-like, it’s Not In Keeping, it leads to abrupt and shocking contrasts, it’s too clean and too shiny … well, yes. At one point it bridges the street, next to a line of Regency Terraces, and is full of arch contempt for that which precedes it, irrespective of an attempt to ‘respond’ to the terrace’s scale through an industrial, lightly brick-clad wall, with storage ever so slightly legible as its function. The shopping mall has a suppressed dreamlife, from the socialist politics of its ‘inventor’, the Viennese architect Victor Gruen, to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the shopping arcade as the house of the dreaming collective. BDP, the architects of this and many, many other recent British buildings, have their own socialist past. They began as a co-operative founded by George Grenfell Baines, an architect of Lancastrian working-class extraction, to unite architects, engineers, sociologists, in a non-hierarchical Partnership which could sidestep the hoary old myth of the autonomous architect (that they became a normal private company in 1997, of all years, seems apt). The mall derives from an attempt to recreate social spaces, to become a socialist-inflected social condenser in the context of consumer capitalism. If we condemn the malls without being very careful about how we go about it, we line up with the likes of Paul Kingsnorth, those who care more for the destruction of village shops than the collapse of industrial civilization.

I still hate it. Some of my friends helped build it, you know. Indulging in a bit of manual labour to save up money for their gap years. The first time I ever went to WestQuay I was shocked by it, not least because of the fact it coincided with the destruction of St Mary’s Street—and in their Waterstone’s I found a copy of the Monbiot book which has a chapter on this very topic. I read the entire chapter in there as a minor, piffling protest. Before WestQuay there was Colonel Seifert’s Arundel Towers—two office blocks surmounting a car park, a slide of which I have been known to use as illustration in discussion of the destruction of modernism in Britain. I remember it faintly; the strangeness and intrigue of its multiple levels and the Dog and Duck pub more than the twin towers. The break with Arundel Towers’ approach to urbanism was hardly total.

In terms of how it interacts with the landscape, WestQuay is as aggressive and forthright as any 1960s public building. It incorporates a deep slope, multiple levels and entry points, and two major walkways bridging the roads that the developers couldn’t obliterate. Unlike some of its postwar precursors, such as Castle Market in Sheffield (of which more later), there’s no pleasure for the walker in traversing all these different ways of getting from A to B. This isn’t merely because the earlier building is picturesquely lived-in and dilapidated, but because it’s not seamless: you feel the movement from one place to another, you are able to enjoy it in some manner, and the spaces contain places where you could stop and think rather than be induced to consume at every possible moment. But it is a remarkably complex building, including within itself a deceptively small street façade to Above Bar, the high street it destroyed, a glazed viewing area as part of the food court, and a John Lewis store reached via (internal, hardly palpable) walkways. Inside is what the mall’s website describes as a ‘focal point’, a descendant of Gruen’s ‘social’ spaces, where the lifts and escalators are all clustered, giving a frictionless impression of constant movement. The gestures at contextualism are present, correct and pathetic. At the end which faces the Medieval Walls, the architects have given it a complimentary and functionless watchtower, and the shiny, plasticky cladding is infilled with rubble to be In Keeping (something which was also employed by Leon Berger in his tower blocks at St Mary’s and Shirley). This rubble is mostly at ground-floor level, where it is part of sloping walls, thick enough to withstand a blast or a ram-raid. It has a symbolic function quite aside from the pomo ‘reference’ to the medieval wall: to deter anyone who ought not to be here.

WestQuay car parks

WestQuay’s social condenser

What makes it particularly malign is what happens at the back. Behind the walls and behind Above Bar is a large patch of wasteland²⁰ and WestQuay’s service areas, which take up a massive amount of urban space. They are made up mostly of multi-storey car parks, but also of the series of retail parks that accompanied the main mall—three of them, all themselves with attendant massive car parks. Needless to say, this is not a nice place to walk around. The entire area, a mile or more, is simply not for pedestrians. Although this might be expected on the Kentish hinterland of the M25, it bears repeating that this is right in the centre of a city, in an era when government white papers have endlessly rambled on about the walkable city. This centrality is part of its justification: it keeps people in the city. But the economy is exactly that of an out-of-town mall: reached by car, actively discouraging leaving the malls and venturing into the city around, uninterested in the possibilities of the city itself, and leaving the other side of town, the side that is not shopping mall, to rot. One upshot of this is the weekend violence along Above Bar, another is the continuing disintegration of St Mary’s. But service industry jobs were indeed duly created.

WestQuay does make an effort in certain respects, and this effort makes it all the more tragic. You can promenade around it, as you can along the city walls. Yet there’s a spectacular incoherence to it all. Each part seems disconnected to the other, aside from the wipe-clean white cladding, and it’s never pulled together through any design idea of any sort because it’s simply impossible to do so. You simply can’t make a building like this into something legible unless the architects are exceptionally talented and/or conscientious (apologies to all at BDP for the implication that they may be neither). We can see here how over the last decade a Modernism of a sort has continued, not as a coherent ideology, an aesthetic or a formal language which embraces and intensifies the experience of modernity, but via the element of it lamented by urbanists and sentimentalists since the 1920s. This is a landscape where the car is dominant, where the idea of streets, walking, any element of surprise, are comprehensively designed out. Conversely, the only way to rediscover some kind of element of excitement in these spaces is to walk around (not inside) them, precisely because the planning itself does not want you to. You see things. You don’t see people, but you see intriguing things, some sort of autonomous logic of commerce almost without leavening or prettification. (I say almost because some of the car parks are faced in brick, the vernacular of some language or other.) Like the Western docks, WestQuay is an inhuman space where capital no longer needs to present a human face, where it thinks nobody is looking.

Marchwood Incinerator

What is appropriate about WestQuay, though, is the way in which it joins onto the container port almost imperceptibly. The roads in the Western Docks are called First, Second and Third Avenue. Follow them and you might reach the Millbrook Superbowl, where you can play that most American and blue-collar of sports, ten-pin bowling. Go back the other way along the approach to the M27, and the containers become an organizing principle. Stacks of containers full of goods on one side, stacks of containers full of people buying goods on the other, each in the form of coloured or corrugated boxes. The elegance of the principle is perfect and some enterprising post-Fordist is bound to combine the two sooner or later, completing the circle by transporting people in those boxes too, using them for transportation, shopping and living all at once. Sure, there are no windows in these things, but put in a few branches of Costa and nobody will complain. Then, untouched by human hands, the containers could be dropped in Dubai or Shenzen, the cruise ships of the twenty-first century. Just across the water from this container city is a gigantic incinerator, designed by Jean-Robert Mazaud. A perfect dome, not Rogers’s deflated tent, silvery steel, not Teflon. It turns rubbish into electricity, and it shines with sinister optimism.