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In fact they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise – Oh! the purple abbots, what a spot had they chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively, that they seemed only to have retired into the world …

HORACE WALPOLE, 1755

In the summer of 1755, Horace Walpole, dilettante son of Britain’s first prime minister, undertook a tour of Hampshire with his friend, John Chute. Along with their mutual friend, the architect and artist Richard Bentley, this bachelor trio formed a ‘Committee of Taste’ to supervise the creation of Walpole’s house on the banks of the Thames at Strawberry Hill, where he was reinventing gothic in stone and stained glass. With its romantic name, castellated turrets and towers and strange chapel in the woods, Strawberry Hill was a three-dimensional expression of the imagination which would inspire the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, written by Walpole in 1764.

As a maligned victim of the Renaissance, gothic was ready for a revival. Scathingly coined by Vasari in the sixteenth century to represent the barbarian destroyers of classical Rome and Greece, Walpole’s rehabilitation of a pejorative term was an act of genteel subversion. ‘His taste as expressed in Strawberry Hill was one of a deliberate rebel counter-culture’, wrote Walpole’s biographer, Timothy Mowl. ‘He was delighted by his own identity and concerned, like a public relations expert, to communicate it to us down the years …’ Walpole was, wrote Mowl, ‘one of the most successful deviant infiltrators that the English establishment has ever produced’, and his Committee of Taste both used and hid behind the fantasy of gothic in the same way that later ‘decadents’ used it to both promote and mask their identities.

The dandyism of Walpole and his successors stood against an age of mass production. It was an individuality symbolised by the romantic figure of the Solitary or the Outsider; the roots of the modern cult of the individual, first discerned in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard’.* Gray had been Walpole’s Eton intimate, and the aristocrat would employ his Committee of Taste to frame Gray’s work in the gothic arches of Bentley’s ‘exquisitely irreverent’ illustrations, making the poet the personification of their cult, an early media superstar.

It was the beginning of a new gothic lineage that would merge with a self-conscious sense of decadence, from the macabre costume drama of the Revolutionary incroyables and merveilleuses of France, to Wilde’s Salomé and its Edwardian interpreter Maud Allan posing as a graveside angel cloaked in black chiffon as she danced to Chopin’s Marche funèbre; from the Sitwells as gothic figures on catafalques, to Diana Cooper as the statue of a gothic nun imprisoned in Oliver Messel’s medieval plaster in The Miracle; from Rex Whistler photographed by Cecil Beaton as Thomas Gray from Bentley’s portrait of the poet in the nude, to Stephen Tennant as a dead Romeo in his silver-foil-covered room, to the silver walls of Andy Warhol’s Factory and its Electric Chair, modern icons produced in a 1960s version of Strawberry Hill: a succession of silver walls, like Walpole’s hall of mirrors, reflecting its decadent narcissists.

Deep-dyed in narcissism, gay and addicted to gossip (although also a serious man of art and letters), Walpole both represented and recorded a frivolity which pervaded English culture – a decadence which gothic, as the extreme expression of romanticism’s counter culture, would embody. Yet this was essentially seen as an unEnglish disease, as the poet Charles Churchill (himself a doomed young hedonist) wrote: ‘With our own island vices not content/ We rob our neighbours on the continent.’ For Walpole, his unhappy Grand Tour of Europe, taken with Gray in tow and in pursuit of his inamorata, the bisexual Lord Lincoln, had served both to encourage his gothic tendency and to import foreign perversions to England.

That summer of 1755, Walpole and his circle embarked on a new tour which would confirm their deviant identities. To them, gothic – Suger’s opus modernum – represented an indefinable, fantasy past; its pointed arches were a rubric for a romantic rebellion which queried the rational progress of their age. When they discovered its ruins, sleeping unawares on the shores of Southampton Water, Netley Abbey would become a locus for their subversive masquerade. The Cistercians’ ‘horrible’ site became an historical reference for what Walpole and his friends were doing at Strawberry Hill. By the time they had finished with it, it would seem as though Netley itself had been redesigned by their Committee of Taste in a new importation of foreign vice to this English shore.

Walpole had been alerted to ‘all the beauties of Netley’ by Gray’s visit to the abbey that July. The place had deeply inspired the poet in his taste for the antiquarian and the ‘romantick’. On 6 August 1755 Gray had written, with an idiosyncratic disdain for punctuation and spelling, to another close friend, Dr Wharton. It was the first of a series of descriptions written that year which fixed Netley as a modern gothic site:

I wished for you often on the Southern Coast, where … the Oaks grow quite down to the Beach, & … the Sea forms a number of Bays little & great, that appear glittering in the midst of thick Groves of them. add to this the Fleet (for I was at Portsmouth two days before it sailed) & the number of Vefsels always pafsing along, or sailing up Southampton-River (wch is the largest of these Bays I mention) and enters about 10 mile into the Land, & you will have a faint Idea of the South. from Fareham to Southampton, where you are upon a level with the coast, you have a thousand such Peeps & delightful Openings … I have been also at Titchfield, at Netly-Abbey, (a most beautiful ruin in as beautiful a situation) at Southampton, at Bevis-Mount, at Winchester &c …

That mid-century summer was the season of Netley’s invention in the gothic imagination. ‘On the arrival of a few fine days, the first we have had this summer’, wrote Walpole, ‘… Mr Chute persuaded me to take a jaunt to Winchester and Netley Abbey, with the latter of which he is very justly enchanted.’ Having spent the night in Southampton, they set out to explore Netley. Walpole was ecstatic; its ruins seemed to fulfil his dreams. ‘But how shall I describe Netley to you?’ he rhapsodised to Bentley. ‘I can only, by telling you it is the spot in the world for which Mr Chute and I wish’:

The ruins are vast, and retain fragments of beautiful fretted roofs pendant in the air, with all the variety of Gothic patterns of windows, wrapped round and round with ivy – many trees are sprouted up against the walls, and only want to be increased with cypresses! A hill rises above the Abbey, encircled with wood; the fort, in which We would build a tower for habitation, remains with two small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey in a wood, in the very centre, on the edge of the hill: on each side breaks in the view of the Southampton sea, deep blue, glistening with silver and vessels; on one side terminated by Southampton, on the other by Calshot Castle; and the Isle of Wight rising above the opposite hills. – In fact they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise – Oh! the purple abbots, what a spot had they chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively, that they seemed only to have retired into the world …

‘… Gray has lately been here’, added Walpole, acknowledging the poet’s lyrical and romantic inspiration. Two months later Gray returned, drawn by Netley’s mysterious spirit (and possibly by the area’s ‘lusty’ boatmen). He wrote from Southampton, ‘at Mr. Vining’s, Plumber, in High-Street’ to another friend, Reverend James Brown, with a description that competed with Walpole’s to capture the dark romance of the ruins:

I received your letter before I left home, & sit down to write to you after the finest walk in the finest day, that ever shone, to Netley-Abbey, my old friend, with whom I long to renew my acquaintance … the sun was all too glaring & too full of gauds [Gray quoted from Shakespeare’s King John] for such a scene, wch ought to be visited only in the dusk of the evening. it stands in a little quiet valley, wch gradually rises behind the ruin into a half-circle crown’d with thick wood, before it on a descent is a thicket of oaks, that serves to veil it from the broad day & from profane eyes, only leaving a peep on both sides, where the sea appears glittering thro’ the shade, & vefsels with their white sails, that glide acrofs & are lost again. concealed behind the thicket stands a little Castle (also in ruins) immediately on the shore, that commands a view over an expanse of sea clear & smooth as glafs (when I saw it) … & in front the deep shades of the New-Forest distinctly seen, because the water is no more than three miles over. the Abbey was never very large. the shell of its church is almost entire, but the pillars of the iles have gone, & the roof has tumbled in, yet some little of it is left in the transept, where the ivy has forced its way thro’, & hangs flaunting down among the fretted ornaments & escutcheons of the Benefactors. much of the lodging & offices are also standing, but all is overgrown with trees & bushes, & mantled here & there with ivy, that mounts over the battlements.

To Thomas Gray’s romantic imagination, such visits induced an almost trance-like state, the evocative ruins ‘pregnant with poetry … One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits at noon-day’, and he visualised its abbot

bidding his beads for the souls of his Benefactors, interr’d in that venerable pile, that lies beneath him … Did you not observe how, as that white sail shot by and was lost, he turn’d and cross’d himself, to drive the Tempter from him, that had thrown that distraction in his way. I should tell you that the Ferryman, who row’d me, a lusty young Fellow, told me, that he would not for all the world pass a night at the Abbey, (there were such things seen near it,) tho’ there was a power of money hid there.

Veiled in its ghost stories – ‘Blind Peter’ was said to guard the abbot’s buried treasure (although such tales were also useful for smugglers using the ruins as a place to land contraband) – the reinvention of Netley was under way. Walpole and Gray’s descriptions, rivalling each other in reverie, distilled the new spirit of the place. Over the next few years their refined taste would percolate through popular culture, spawning a new cult. Such descriptions, apparently private but written quite consciously for public consumption, would summon a host of artists, writers and gothic aficionados to this Hampshire shore, determined to commune with its ghostly spirits.

In 1761, the newly-rich Thomas Lee Dummer, William Chamberlayne’s friend at Woolston House, acquired Netley Abbey and, fearless of Walter Taylor’s fate, uprooted the entire north transept and transferred it to the grounds of his new home, Cranbury Park, near Winchester, where it was reassembled as an authentic gothic folly. Dummer’s vandalism was a fashionable act of ‘improvement’: seven years later, Fountains Abbey, the great Cistercian foundation in Yorkshire, was bought by the local squire, who surrounded it with smooth lawns, subsuming it into his artificial landscape and ‘providing its owner with an aesthetic object on the scale of the Roman Forum or the Colosseum’.

Yet despite Dummer’s depradations, his eye for the picturesque was credited with the presentation of Netley’s ruins as a sublime location – as though he himself had been directed by the Committee of Taste. Francis Gosse, the artist who recorded the still intact abbey in 1760 and 1761 for his Antiquities of England and Wales, praised Dummer for having ‘greatly improved the beauty and solemnity of the scene by a judicious management of the trees which have spontaneously sprung up among the mouldering walls’. From its selection by the Cistercians as a wild site, through their civilisation and subsequent dissolution, Netley, recaptured by Nature, was now being subtly relandscaped, both physically and aesthetically, by the romantic imagination, its stones ‘so overgrown with ivy, and interspersed with trees, as to form a scene, inspiring the most pleasing melancholy’. The abbey’s ruins were ‘discovered’ in the same way as were the classical remains of the ancient world. Engulfed by Nature and aged by Time, the abbey was like Rome, ‘an immense garden ruin, a hortus conclusus, in which nature and civilisation had reached a kind of harmony’. It spoke of intangible eternities on an English shore, rising out of the vegetation like the Colosseum, or like an Egyptian temple emerging from the sands, a Hampshire version of the ‘vast desolation’ which greeted Shelley’s traveller as he gazed on the lifeless works of Ozymandias.

Netley Abbey, 1776

With Continental unrest curtailing Grand Tours, the English imagination was turned in on itself and its own past. The search for the sublime had to be sated nearer to home, and Netley fulfilled this desire. By 1765 the effect of Thomas Gray’s antiquary elegies was being felt in popular literature, with the publication of the pamphlet/tour guide, THE RUINS OF NETLEY ABBEY A Poem in Blank Verse, prefaced by a quote from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi:

I do love these ancient Ruins:

We never tread upon them, but we set

Our foot on some reverend History

And continuing anonymously,

High on the summit of yon verdant plain,

Beneath whose falling edge, the pebbled shore,

Swept by the billows of the Western flood,

Repels the rage of Neptune; there behold

The scattered heaps of Netley’s ancient fane

Through many centuries in record fam’d:

At length her stately fabric is no more.

With Thomas Dummer’s death, Netley’s ruins passed, via his widow, to Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland, himself an artist who, acknowledging the growing taste for the picturesque, allowed public access to the ruins. A flattering – if not obsequious – contemporary guide noted: ‘It is fortunate for the lovers of antiquities that these beautiful ruins are now in the possession of a gentleman, whose regard for the arts, elegant taste, and practical as well as theoretic skill in picturesque matters, ensure to the public every care in the preservation of them.’ Thus opened up and extolled, Netley’s fortunes rose like the moon over its ruins by night, casting its medieval stones in a glamorous new light. In 1790, the poet William Sotheby, who lived nearby at Bevis Mount, just up the Itchen, produced his ‘Ode, Netley Abbey; Midnight’:

Within the sheltered centre of the aisle,

Beneath the ash whose growth romantic spreads

Its foliage trembling o’er the funeral pile,

And all around a deeper darkness sheds;

While through yon arch, where the thick ivy twines,

Bright on the silvered tower the moon-beam shines,

And the grey cloister’s roofless length illumines,

Upon the mossy stone I lie reclined,

And to a visionary world resigned

Call the pale spectres forth from the forgotten tombs.

Such was its power that Netley Abbey began to acquire national status, admired even in the fashionable metropolis, seventy miles away. In 1794 William Shield staged his Netley Abbey – A Comic Opera at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Its plot revolves around the Oakland and Woodbine families, representatives of the Georgian gentry who had settled on Southampton Water. Mr Oakland – played by Joseph Munden – is a modern man, and like William Chamberlayne seeks to capitalise on the nearby ruins, creating an improved landscape by clearing ancient woodland. In the first scene of act one, he is confronted by his daughter, Lucy, played by Miss Hopkins:

Lucy: Dear sir, in that case all the country about us, will appear desolate. I shall really fancy myself to be ‘Zelinda in the Desart’.

Oakland: I know it will seem desolate – but you must be sensible ’tis done by way of improvement. How else can I open the vista, to command a fuller view of Netley Abbey?

Lucy: And is the sweet embowered cottage belonging to Mrs Woodbine, where I used to read the ‘Dear Recess,’ indeed to come down?

Oakland: Yes, it is; for you must find some other nook to be miserable in … How else are the improvements to go on? All to the Westward must immediately be cleared; and by the fall of the leaf, I hope not a tree will be left standing.

Lucy: Cruel as the office is, I must prepare Miss Woodbine for this event: the information may else come with a severity she cannot sustain. [Exit]

Oakland: That girl gathers all her absurd notions, from silly romances – and while I go on improving, she, as if in direct opposition, goes on reading …

NETLEY ABBEY

an Operatic Farce in two acts,

as performed at the Theatre-Royal Covent Garden.

If Oakland is a vested member of the squirearchy, then it is equally evident that the passionate young Lucy is probably addicted to Mrs Radcliffe’s gothic novels. Her proto-environmentalism is set against her father’s use of the code-word of Whiggery – ‘improvement’; they are also a symbol of the eighteenth-century generation gap. In the succeeding scenes Lucy’s bosom friend, Ellen Woodbine, suffers a grievous loss when her family’s cottage is burnt down and her fortune is lost, only for the hero – Lucy’s brother, the dashing Captain Oakland (Charles Incledon) – to discover that Miss Woodbine’s bonds were in fact stolen. In the final dramatic moonlit denouement, he uncovers them hidden in the ruins of the abbey. Even under these sublime stones, decency and rationality triumph.

The opera is also very much the product of Southampton’s late eighteenth-century reputation as a spa resort, and the great influx of the fashionable who came to visit it and its tourist spots. Catering to that spa culture, the opera draws on sentimental whimsy and rousing patriotism, such Captain Oakland’s stirring number:

Should dangers e’er approach our Coast

The inbred Spirit of the land

Would animate each heart

Would animate each head

Would bind, wou’d bind us in one general Host

Would bind, wou’d bind us in one general Host

ENGLAND ENGLAND ENGLAND

… Our isles best rampart is the sea

The midnight mark of Foes it braves

And Heav’n that fenc’d us round

That fenc’d us round with waves

Ordain’d the people to be free

Ordain’d the people to be free

ENGLAND, &c

Such robust sentiment, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a football chant, was hardly resonant with the fey subversiveness of gothic, although its fears of imminent (French) invasion concorded with Southampton’s vulnerable position in the patriotic body and the dangers that might indeed approach its coast – a sense of insular adversity elsewhere represented in the recently-composed and equally stirring ‘Rule Britannia’.

William Shield, born in County Durham in 1748, was a well-known and prolific composer, and his popular tune Rosina would become the melody for ‘Auld Lang Syne’. A republican with ‘sympathies with the Godwin circle’, his opera-pantomime of 1784, The Magic Cavern, ‘anticipated the Gothick Horrors of Mrs Radclyffe’; he died, presumably in London, in 1829. But Netley Abbey is also credited in contemporary texts to William Pearce, ‘a pretty successful dramatist’ working in the last quarter of the century, ‘of whose life we have not been able to learn any particulars’, as an early Victorian source notes. This intimate pair seem to have co-operated as composer and librettist – a list of Pearce’s works appears identical to those attributed to Shield: The Nunnery, 1785; Arrival at Portsmouth, 1794; Windsor Castle, 1795 – or perhaps they were one and the same, two sides of a prolific eighteenth-century Lloyd-Webber, teasing me with their identity down the years. On opening a bound collection of Shield’s operas, the title page of his ‘musical farce’ The Lock and Key declared it to be ‘Composed and Selected by Mr Shield. The Words by P. Hoare Esq.’

Displayed on the London stage in replica, Netley’s ruins had become a gothic commodity. In 1795 the Reverend Richard Warner wrote his Netley Abbey, a Gothic Story in Two Volumes, another opportunist conflation, printed by the Minerva Press (‘the most famous house of sensational fiction’, publishers of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels). Warner’s morality tale – translated into both German and French editions – conflates Netley’s myths in its medieval hero, Edward de Villars, who rescues an imprisoned nineteen-year-old girl, the beautiful, auburn-haired Agnes, from a cell in the abbey in which she was confined by the wicked Abbot Peter, in the pay of the yet more evil Sir Hildebrand Warren who has already murdered her father, and whose ghost comes back to haunt him. In the final scene both the Abbot and Sir Hildebrand meet a bloody end, allowing Agnes to be reunited with her brother and the author to draw his moral conclusion on ‘persecuted virtue’.

As well as inspiring such sensational literature, Netley also prompted a healthy trade in cheap prints. Tourists could have the romantic ruins as seen through its woods, thrillingly overgrown, or from the shore, jauntily contrasted with the modern traffic of Southampton Water. Catering to the market, commercial artists provided visitors with a memento of their visit, a keepsake to take home with their guidebooks (after they had carefully cut their initials into the stones in eighteenth-century graffiti). But serious painters were also drawn to the site: the watercolourist Francis Towne made a series of pictures between 1798 and 1809; and in 1816 John Constable spent his honeymoon sketching at Netley, Weston Shore and Southampton. For the meteorologically-obsessed Constable, the sea-swept clouds and the abbey’s setting below such changing skies were a large part of its appeal. The ruins seemed to evoke dark memories for the artist: after the death of his wife, Maria, from tuberculosis in 1828, he used a sepulchral sketch of the abbey for one of his nocturnal watercolours, issued as a popular engraving in 1829.

Directed by artistic and literary taste, a visit to Netley stirred deep passions. ‘Few people, perhaps, who think at all’, declared the 1796 pocket guide to Southampton,

can visit the remains of these ancient religious fabrics, without expressing a sensation, which, as it arises from a combination of different emotions, is hardly to be described … the reflection that we are treading over ground peopled with the remains of our fellow-creatures, who were once young and vigorous like ourselves, inspires the awful idea of our own mortality – that we ere long must be like them, silent, neglected, and forgotten.

Such reveries were a symptom of the age. It was a century which began, as Isaiah Berlin wrote, ‘by being calm and smooth … rationality is progressed, the Church is retreating, unreason is yielding …’ But suddenly these clear skies were clouded by ‘a violent eruption of emotion, enthusiasm. People become interested in gothic buildings, in introspection. People suddenly become neurotic and melancholy; they begin to admire the unaccountable flight of spontaneous genius.’

It was the Industrial Revolution that had darkened the horizon and produced the transition in which the goths of Netley, Cobbett’s radicalism and Chamberlayne’s Whiggish improvements were all caught up in their own ways. ‘… Under the surface of this apparently coherent, apparently elegant century there are all kinds of dark forces moving’, wrote Berlin. The mystic necromancers, the experimenters in occult sciences, Dr Mesmer’s ‘animal magnetism’, the Illuminati and William Blake’s fantastic visions became the mysterious obverse to improved landscapes and scientific theorems. Superstition and alienation in a world of enclosure and transportation gathered in the clouds that gave gothic its darkness, and shaded the tourists’ mock-pagan worship of Netley’s Christian ruins with something more atavistic, something more than mere spectacle. It may have been a tourist site, but Netley also expressed a dissatisfaction with the age; its ancient stones spoke of modern concerns.

Like the plague culture of medieval times, gothic became almost entirely concerned with the grandeur of decay itself, obsessed with morbidity and decrepitude, passion and death. Its cult heroes were the heroes and creators of the sensational novels which the Reverend Warner’s book imitated: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s pulp fiction, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, with its pregnant nuns and rapist monks (followed by his Crazy Jane, a poetic encounter with a madman using material gathered from his visits to asylums). Its aficionados were drawn to extreme expression of their own self-questioning: young men such as Shelley, whose restless life, riven with disputed inheritance, suicidal lovers and psychological instability, seemed to live out gothic sensation. At eighteen, he wrote a gothic novel, Zastrozzi, in which the hero encounters a castle in the woods, ‘a large and magnificent building, whose battlements rose above the lofty trees’, just as Netley’s ruins were hidden and revealed by its own verdure. And in 1818, his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey caricatured Shelley and his circle: the poet ‘Scythrop Glowry’ living in a mystical tower by the sea, like Netley, ‘ruinous and full of owls’, and Mr Flosky (based on Coleridge) for whom ‘mystery was his mental element. He lived in the midst of that visionary world in which nothing is but what is not. He dreamed with his eyes open, and saw ghosts dancing round him at noontide.’

Netley had entered its most public phase, a spectacle as romantic, thrilling and sensational as any attraction in London’s Oxford Street Pantheon. Tourists took the ferry from Southampton to Netley’s shore to sample its sublime charms – the experience given a further piquance by the fact that their time there was proscribed by the tides upon which their return to civilisation depended. This special access made the abbey’s ruins that much more wondrous and magical, as if it were a vision revealed at Nature’s whim. And among the many who came across the water was one writer who had newly taken up residence in Southampton’s fashionable spa: Jane Austen.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Southampton had been in decline, suffering the after-effects of the revisited plague of 1665, imported to the town when a misguided humanitarian gave sanctuary to an infected child from London. On his 1724 tour of the country, Daniel Defoe announced, ‘Southampton is a truly antient town, for ’tis in a manner dying with age; the decay of the trade is the real decay of the town; and all the business of the moment that is transacted there, is the trade between us and the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, with a little of the wine trade, and much smuggling.’ But like Netley’s abbey, Southampton had reinvented itself, and within twenty years its fortunes had been turned around.

Fashionable eighteenth-century society demanded two particular nostrums: mineral waters and sea bathing; Southampton could supply both. Beyond the city walls a spring was discovered to produce chalybeate waters impregnated with iron salts, a homoeopathic pot pourri imbued with the power to cure all manner of ills, from leprosy to hydrophobia (although it didn’t prevent an outbreak of the disease in 1807, whose rabid victims thirsted for water they could not bear to drink). For Southampton, as for Netley, water was its great advantage. ‘Bathing has generally been attained with the best effect’, the Southampton Guide informed its readers – affluent citizens most likely to suffer the nervous disorders of their station. For weak constitutions worn down by the stress of modern life, immersion in the sea was a celebrated cure. ‘Relaxation is the common cause of complaints incident to the higher order of persons in England’, the guide continued, ‘and, except in the case of unsound viscera, the cold bath gently braces the solids and accelerates the blood’s motion.’

Below the town’s medieval walls, tidal sea-water baths were built, with elegantly-glazed ‘Long Rooms’ for ‘interested spectators’, and a promenade known as ‘The Beach’ along which, on their visit in the summer of 1755, Horace Walpole and John Chute had ‘walked long by moonlight’. As Walpole noted, the town was already ‘crowded; sea-bathers are established there too’. A month or so later their friend Thomas Gray was complaining,

This place is still full of Bathers. I know not a Soul, nor have once been at the rooms. the walks all round it are delicious, & so is the weather. lodgings very dear & fish very cheap. here is no Coffeehouse, no Bookseller, no Pastry-Cook: but here is the Duke of Chandos …

As with any upwardly-mobile area, the facilities of a fashionable resort soon arrived. Mrs Remacle opened her coffee house in the High Street, and lending libraries and grander assembly rooms sprang up, the voyeuristic spa society and nexus for elaborate masked balls, although their proximity to the less salubrious parts of town encouraged dissent among ‘the rougher elements of the poor, resentful of the amusements of the well-to-do and the fashionable visitors’. At one masque given in 1773, a young man leaving his lodgings dressed as a shepherd was set upon and ‘tossed like a football for some time … [until] some humane persons intervened’.

The contrasts of privilege and deprivation which across the Channel were about to erupt in revolution were just as evident in Southampton’s spa. The following year, 1774, a ‘remarkably brilliant’ masquerade made ‘the mob so riotous that it was with difficulty the company got in and out of their carriages, and the streets were one continued scene of riot and confusion all evening’. As the balls grew more fantastic, so too did local opposition to such aristocratic decadence. One held at the new Polygon Hotel featured costumed revellers as ‘a Jew pedlar, Tancreds, Spaniards, sailors, nosegay-girls and ballad-singers’ – the kind of fancy dress hedonism in which the Bright Young People would engage two centuries later. On this occasion the event was marred by a large stone being lobbed through the window which narrowly missed the Duke of Gloucester.

However disgruntled the locals may have been at the excesses of their betters – against which behaviour their French colleagues sans-culottes would take direct action – the ‘fashionable visitors’ felt secure in the knowledge that Southampton’s reputation as a genteel resort had been sealed by royal approval. In 1750 George II’s son, Frederick Prince of Wales, had visited the town to bathe; by the 1760s, his two younger brothers had eschewed their now reigning brother’s partiality for Weymouth – where the King went to soothe the onset of his madness – and had become Southampton’s social patrons. By the 1780s, Southampton was enjoying the peak of its fashionability, confirmed by the arrival of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as The Times’s man on the spot informed its readers.

Extract of a letter from Southampton, Aug. 2

Fashion and taste have fixed their head quarters at this place, for the season. Dance and song succeed in merry round. The rooms crowded, which, by the bye, is not a little owing to the extreme attention and politeness of the Master of Ceremonies. Lodgings filled with fashionable belles and beaux – and, what is more decisively recommendatory, less extortion and imposition happen here, than at most seabathing places of summer resort.

The beautiful Duchess, with her party, has just left Southampton; her return is expected in a few days.

Newspaper reports grew from single paragraphs listing various lords and ladies to spectacular two-column lists comprising a substantial muster of London’s society. By 1788, the Southampton season was firmly in the social calendar, accompanied by the kind of hype that would be employed to advertise later resorts; the town had become the English equivalent of Antibes, yet more so in an era when European turmoil precluded foreign travel. The Beach and the Long Rooms thronged with dandified men and elegant women craning their necks and fluttering their fans. ‘This place now boasts the most fashionable and numerous company of any of the watering places,’ reported The Times in July 1788. The actor David Garrick had visited, it noted, ‘the Duke of Gloucester will certainly be here, and the Duke of Orleans is so pleased, that he means to pass some weeks at this delightful spot’. The following year the King came with his Queen and Princess, entertained at breakfast by a dutiful, and doubtless grateful, Corporation.

It was the making of modern Southampton, bringing the kind of figures only the age of the ocean liner could entice back to the port. Indeed, not only were many introduced to the area’s charms, some were persuaded to stay there, making it their country residence. ‘If Southampton has decreased in trade, it has increased prodigiously in splendour and elegance’, the 1781 Guide to Southampton could retort to Defoe’s slur on an ‘antient town’, ‘and many gentlemen of fortune have come to settle here, since it has become so polite a place’.

One of those gentlemen, James Dott, lived at Bitterne Grove, the building which was to become my school. Dott was an East India Company surgeon who, having served in the great new colonial acquisition of India, had ended up at Southampton, where his eccentric habits were supposed by local legend to have been the source of the adjective ‘dotty’; in old age, Dott was to be seen being wheeled about town in a basket chair, as if staking his claim to his neologism. He was also remembered for the fact that he had employed as his gardener Touissant-Ambrose Talour de la Cartrie, the Comte de Villienière, an aristocratic casualty of Revolutionary France who had taken refuge in Southampton in 1796 after a series of miraculous escapades worthy of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

At school we were told that among the visitors to the eccentric James Dott were the Austens; legend even embroidered the scene to include Jane seated under the great oak tree on its lawn, writing, although there is nothing to substantiate such a romantic picture. The Austens lived in the leas of Lord Lansdowne’s newly-built gothic folly, with the town walls at the end of their garden. ‘We hear that we are envied our House by many people, & that the Garden is the best in Town’, Jane told her sister, but she was scathing of Southampton’s dressmakers, theatres, and ‘young women without partners, & each of them with two ugly, naked shoulders!’ The town featured just once in her fiction, in her youthful novel Love and Friendship, when it serves to remind her of ‘stinking fish’.

Netley, however, presented a different prospect. She had completed Northanger Abbey four years previously, but it seems it is almost certain that Austen, born and brought up in Hampshire, an afternoon’s ride from Netley, had drawn on its abbey – by now the stuff of novellas, odes and operas – for her gothic satire.

Austen the rationalist had parodied Mrs Radcliffe’s books in her fin-de-siècle novel, in which her heroine Catherine Morland is a young girl who, like Lucy Oakland in Shield’s opera, yearns for the romance she has read about in her gothic novels: ‘As they drew near the end of their journey, her impatience for a sight of the abbey … returned in full force, and every bend on the road was expected with solemn awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls of grey stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sunset playing in beautiful splendour on its high Gothic windows.’ The reality of the fictional Northanger is a house furnished in the modern taste, although Catherine discovers that, like Paulet’s palace, it is partly housed in a medieval abbey:

… Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.

In September 1807 the Austens arrived on Netley’s beach, clambered out of the ferry and set off to explore the site. Moving through the oak trees which still lined the shore, the sense of discovery and anticipation – and the limits of tidal access – made their expedition to this laetus locus yet more thrilling. Linger too long in this haunted, ruin-strewn wood, and they might end up having to spend the night there.

As the party came upon the abbey itself, the prospect of its grey stones and trees was almost too much for Jane’s impressionable fourteen-year-old niece. Like Catherine Morland and Lucy Oakland, Fanny Austen was a girl of her time. Attempting to capture the effect Netley had upon her that afternoon, she wrote to her governess in the astonished, breathless tones of a gothic aficionado (which her aunt so excelled at parodying), her bosom all but heaving with the gushing tribute:

Never was there anything in the known world to be compared to that compound of everything that is striking, ancient and majestic: we were struck dumb with admiration, and I wish I could write anything that would come near to the sublimity of it, but that is utterly impossible as nothing I could say would give you a distant idea of its extreme beauty.

Carried away by reverie, Fanny could only sink into Netley’s dream-like state, thrown into a medieval mystery, suspended from reality and Southampton’s stinking fish.

Fanny Austen’s reaction to the abbey ruins was characteristic of the day-trippers from spa-town Southampton. They sought the same kind of sensation from Netley as a modern audience would from a horror movie, and Netley catered to them with aplomb. It was a thrilling place. With its many chambers, galleries, arched windows and doors, some opening strangely into mid-air and all overhung with ivy in the shade of great trees, the very asymmetrical, twisting layout of the abbey and its outbuildings created an enchanted realm for visitors to explore, somewhere between an eighteenth-century theme park and a chamber of horrors. Around any crumbling arch might lurk the ghost of ‘Blind Peter’, jealously guarding the abbot’s buried treasure.

Now the gothic thirst for sensation created a new Netley experience: the abbey by moonlight. Excited goths could set out, in keen anticipation of the abbey’s morbid charms, on midnight tours accompanied by guides bearing flaming torches. Moving in procession through the dark trees and looming stone piles, startled by dancing shadows on ancient walls, young ladies in thin dresses clutched tightly to their gratified consorts’ arms and affected to faint away at the thrill of it all.

Netley had become the equivalent of a night club, a fashionable venue for young people dressed in the extravagant spirit of the times, like their cousins across the Channel with their impossibly high collars, cutaway coats and sheer muslin dresses worn revealingly dampened. The French dandies wore thin red ribbons around their necks in a mocking gesture to the ‘holy mother Guillotine’; their English counterparts sported black velvet collars in a similarly ironic gesture of mourning for their fellow aristocrats. While the unrest which threatened to import revolution to England required more troops to quell it than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsular War, their protest against industrialised society consisted of an obsession with neck ties and the latest gothic novel.

‘The reading public …’, Nightmare Abbey’s Mr Flosky complains, ‘requires a perpetual adhibition of sauce piquante to the palate of its depraved imagination. It laid upon ghosts, goblins and skeletons … till even the devil himself … became too base, common, and popular for its surfeited appetite.’ Like any other cult, gothic moved from creative originality to commercial exploitation. Soon unrestricted fêtes champêtres dispelled any notion of solitude at Netley’s ruins. By 1815, when Mary Brunton visited the site, the proliferation of toy stalls, gingerbread sellers and common rabble of picnickers in the abbey’s precincts had become an offence to the aesthetic eye, making romantic reverie all but impossible. Netley’s popularity destroyed the very spirit that had generated it, and the gothic commodification begun by Walpole and his Committee of Taste became part of a popular culture to which its sexy sensationalism proved more appealing than Enlightenment rationalism.

By the time William Cobbett wrote his eulogy to Netley, Walpole’s refined aesthetic had long been subsumed by its popularised version. On another ‘rural ride’, Cobbett encountered a certain Mr Montague’s estate in north Hampshire, a man of new money who had enthusiastically decorated in the gothic fashion. ‘Of all the ridiculous things I ever saw in my life this place is the most ridiculous’, blustered Cobbett. ‘The house looks like a sort of church … with crosses on the tops of different parts of the pile …’ One gothic arch

was composed of Scotch fir wood, as rotten as a pear; nailed together in such a way as to make the thing appear, from a distance, like the remnant of a ruin! I wonder how long this sickly, this childish taste is to remain? I do not know who this gentleman is. I suppose he is some honest person from the ’Change or its neighbourhood; and that these gothic arches are to denote the antiquity of his origin!

Cobbett’s polemic harked back to St Bernard of Clairvaux’s pronouncements; the gothic style which had meant to replace excess had become imbued with it. As a reactionary refuge from a modern era of industrial unrest and protest, gothic was a symbol of conservatism, and rapidly becoming Britain’s ‘national style’. In the process, Netley became a place of common, if not uproarious entertainment. ‘On Mondays, the Fountain Court presents a singular scene of gaiety’, wrote an observer in the 1840s. ‘It has long been the custom for people from Southampton and the neighbourhood to meet at the Abbey on that day, and to hold a kind of festival. Tea and other provisions are furnished by the inhabitants of a neighbouring cottage, and this is followed by music and dancing.’

The abbey had lost its edge. Its thrills debased, by 1840 Netley’s reputation was such that it became a subject of Richard Harris Barham’s satirical Ingoldsby Legends. A minor canon at St Paul’s, and an eccentric figure himself (having been crippled as a young man in a carriage accident which left him with a twisted arm) Barham produced his ironic ode, ‘Netley Abbey, A Legend of Hampshire’ as a parody of all those verses that had gone before. His alter-ego ‘Ingoldsby’ imagines the abbey in its medieval heyday, with nuns winking at ‘gardener lads’ and consequently finding themselves ‘Wall’d up in a hole with never a chink,/No light, – no air, – no victuals, – no drink!’, and provides an antiquarian footnote to his tale: ‘About the middle of the last century a human skeleton was discovered in a recess in the wall among the ruins of Netley. On examination the bones were pronounced to be those of a female. Teste James Harrison, a youthful but intelligent cab-driver of Southampton, who “well remembers to have heard his grandmother say that ‘Somebody told her so’”.’ But the poet’s reverie is broken by ‘the popping of Ginger Beer!’ dispensed to the modern crowds at Netley by ‘a hag surrounded by crockery-ware’, while chimney sweeps play ‘pitch and toss’, and

Two or three damsels, frank and free,

Are ogling, and smiling, and sipping Bohea.

Parties below, and parties above,

Some making tea, and some making love.

In a gentler echo of Cobbett’s sardony, Barham ends his verse with a visitor

scandalized,

Finding these beautiful ruins so Vandalized,

And thus of their owner to speak began,

As he ordered you home in haste,

NO DOUBT HE’S A VERY RESPECTABLE MAN,

But – ‘I can’t say much for his taste.’

The term ‘vandalized’ was itself a witty play on words, as the original Vandals who ravaged Rome in 455 were a Teutonic tribe like the Goths after whom the movement had been ironically named. The new barbarians had consigned Netley’s gothic idyll to the fashions and taste of another time.

In Southampton, meanwhile, questions of taste were paramount, the barometer by which its fortunes could rise or fall. The island’s waters still beckoned, but now the age of the spa had been superseded – in royal and aristocratic fashionability – by the age of the yacht, and attention had moved down Southampton Water to the Isle of Wight and Cowes, and eventually to Osborne, where Victoria would set up her holiday home. The ‘gentry of the first rank and fashion’ – that fickle bunch – were now only passing through the town en route for the island, hardly long enough for its tradespeople to make a profit, or its destitute to chuck a brick. By 1817 the Spa Gardens were virtually deserted, and by 1820 the town’s tonic waters available only in bottles from local chemists. If it were to survive in the modern world, Southampton would have to change again. To this task its intrepid, waterside population proved equal. Once more its waters would rescue it, and within a generation, this geographically-blessed place – with its double high tides and safe harbour yet more accessible in the age of steamships and the railway line that now linked it to London – had entered a new period of success.

Like the rest of England, everything changed with the coming of the railways. Populations became mobile, and expanding towns were connected by this powerful new web of communication. As a result, Southampton had to cede its role as a ‘retreat for retirement’ to Bournemouth and Brighton, its decline as a seaside resort ironically sealed by the social mobility which elsewhere had made coastal towns accessible, but which in Southampton ran between the beach and the town, separating the citizens from their seaside with its iron rails and belching smoke. To the east, the line ploughed through Chamberlayne’s improved landscape, gouging out its way with high embankments and brick viaducts, seeding the land with new suburbs like fireweed as it went.

In the process, it too, like Netley, grew a little commoner, as though it had been contaminated down the railway line with a Cockney accent. The Whitehall Review noted that in the town ‘slowly, but surely, has been established the reign of Genteel Vulgarity’ and that in the high street ‘the talking is very loud, the laughter very loud, and the ladies’ dresses for the most part to match. So, too, the garb of the Southampton youth is fearfully and wonderfully made, and he has a way of looking around him which seems to say, “See here – what a dog I am!”.’

The railway also brought a new class of admirer to Netley. Picnickers now besported themselves in the ruins, as did their metropolitan counterparts at the Crystal Palace, where Paxton’s gigantic greenhouse enclosed ancient elms growing in Hyde Park, just as mature trees grew up in the abbey’s roofless nave. The Great Exhibition celebrated industry, progress and the future; Netley – with its own aspirations to being a crystal palace, its technologically innovative tracery windows having collapsed into decrepitude – represented the past. Gothic itself was turned from its effete, decadent eighteenth-century incarnation into a more rigorous, muscular nineteenth-century aesthetic. To Augustus Pugin, a Catholic convert, the championing of gothic was nothing less than ‘an answer to current social and cultural crises’. From aesthetic spectacle gothic had returned to utilitarian function, although Pugin’s crusade would culminate in suburban villas and terraces, their scaled-down gothic porches appealing to some atavistic sense of the mythic English past. It was a long way from Strawberry Hill’s Committee of Taste, and even further from Abbot Suger’s opus modernum.

Once more Netley’s ruins would respond to the spirit of the times. Just as gothic changed its meaning, so did the abbey. In 1861, Punch noted that ‘The place has been cleared and cleaned without having been Cockneyfied; it has been furnished with convenient and inconspicuous seats, and rendered permeable throughout.’ At the same time it lamented the fact that when the Lady Chapel had been cleared of ‘rubbish’ and revealed ‘a piece of encaustic tile pavement near the altar … several pieces have been stolen by some robbers who procured admission in the disguise of respectable-looking people’; the magazine called for police patrols of the area. Three years later, William Howitt noted the same reservations which Barham had satirised; the conflicting pressures of popularity and access with art and intellectual demands which the newly-mobile modern world had created:

The visitors and tourists of to-day are just as much charmed with the ruins of Netley as the monks and Walpole were. They crowd there in summer to picnic amongst the ruined walls and lofty trees, and are not always careful to avoid desecrating these delightful spots with their relics of greasy paper, and of shrimps and sardine boxes. But the grounds are carefully kept, and these unsightly objects daily removed, to be only in fine weather daily left again; a strange desecration that one would think every lover of the picturesque would feel instinctively aware of.

These were egalitarian times, and romanticism – like the great unwashed – had to be kept in check. The rigours of Victorian technoculture had settled on the world, and fey imagination took a backseat. Howitt noted that ‘Horace Walpole, in his days of gothic enthusiasm, was enchanted with Netley, and seems to have contemplated restoring at least enough of it for a house. What an escape it had of being Strawberry-hilled!’ Sentimentalised on tinted postcards of picnic scenes and the ordinary people at play, Netley had lost its sense of subversion. Accepting their latest role, the abbey ruins gave up their sensational past and slipped back into sleepy indolence.

The sky looks as though someone has been dropping ink in it. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, rain-dark clouds seem almost to touch the trees around the ruins. Each year, the lowering stratosphere descends a little more, shrouding every horizon with an industrial gothic legacy.

In the 1880s, Ruskin, the champion of the Gothic Revival, lectured on The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century and his ‘obsession with black skies and plague winds’: ‘I believe these swift and mocking clouds and colours are only between storms’, he wrote. ‘They are assuredly new in Heaven, so far as my life reaches. I never saw a single example of them till after 1870.’ Edging nearer to madness – as though those clouds precipitated his insanity – Ruskin had become obsessed by the effect of industrialisation on the climate, writing in his diary, ‘By the plague-winds every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round the world.’ Like Pugin, who, overworked by his final commission to design the ‘medieval court’ for the Great Exhibition, had been admitted to Bedlam, Ruskin too became insane. After attacks of mania which left him remote from the world for his last ten years, Ruskin died in an influenza epidemic in 1900, watching the skies over his Lake District home.

Beauty had become a problem for the modern world. In his prose-poem ‘A Phenomenon of the Future’ – written in 1864, the same year as Howitt’s antiquarian tribute to the abbey – the Decadent poet Stéphane Mallarmé envisaged ‘A pale sky, over a world ending in decrepitude, will perhaps disappear with the clouds: faded purple shreds of sunsets dying in a sleeping river on a horizon submerged in light and water … in an age that has outlived beauty’, ‘une epoque qui survit à la beauté’. Victorian champions of progress like T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and coiner of the term ‘agnostic’, vigorously challenged such decadent romanticism. In 1886 Huxley rebuked the regressive aesthetics of the Wordsworthian ‘Lake District Defence Society’. ‘People’s sense of beauty should be more robust’, snorted the rationalist, ‘I have had apocalyptic visions looking down Oxford Street at a sunset before now.’

Blakean revelation had little place in the reality of the new world, and Netley’s romantic visitors – Walpole, Gray and all who came in their wake – could not have imagined the overcast world of their descendants, threatened by new storm clouds. Heavy rain floods the beach road, making it impassible, as if to revert Netley to the Cistercians’ ‘horrible’ site. Passing the sign that marks the city’s boundaries, you turn into the gateway beyond, where an older metal plate announces that ‘Netley Abbey, the property of the Chamberlayne family, was placed in the guardianship of the Commissioners of Works under the Ancient Monuments Act 1913 by Tankerville Chamberlayne Esq. of Cranbury Park Winchester August 1922’.

The reforming, reconstructing twentieth century had a new use for Netley. It repaired the ruins, mowed the lawns, clipped the trees and imposed strict opening hours. The modern world had come to regard such places as educational, rather than emotional sites. The voice of authority and the lecturing texts of 1950s National Trust handbooks, rather than the florid romanticism of eighteenth-century prose, now dictated Netley’s aesthetic. Clad in his grey suit and tie, the ascetic German émigré Nikolaus Pevsner arrived to survey the abbey in the early Sixties. ‘In 1828 the ruins were embedded in trees’, he noted. ‘It must have been a wonderful site, but the Ministry of Public Works are rightly concerned with making the ruins instructive … At Netley there is too much to learn, and intellectual pleasures have their privileges side by side with visual ones.’

The Buildings of England may have extolled the intellectual pleasures of ruins such as Netley, but few visit it with textbook in hand to be educated by these whalebone arches beached on Netley’s shore. Its lawns are usually quiet and for the most part undisturbed, save for wedding parties using the stones as a photographic backdrop, and theatre companies taking advantage of a ready-made medieval set. Yet on one day each year its sanctity is revived on the Feast of the Assumption, the day the Blessed Virgin Mary ascended to Heaven, the moon and stars at her feet. On a summer’s evening the ghostly procession of white-vestmented priests and altar-boys and the blue incense seem to retrieve the past, and placed on a pillar stump is a statue of its dedicatee, enshrined in flowers like a holy well.

A hundred years ago William Howitt could ignore the sight of discarded sardine cans: ‘The visitor, seated on a fallen stone, still feels a forest silence around him; and the neighbourhood of the Southampton Water seems to complete the feeling of the monastic tranquility which for ages brooded over the spot.’ It is still possible to access that spirit: the Cistercian monk’s austere regime, the aesthete’s rarefied contemplation, the Regency adolescent’s bosom heaving with delighted horror. Arches frame dark yews, crows caw in tall beeches, and an ancient, blowsy oak which survived the Commissioner of Works’ cull might still be modelling for Constable’s sketchbook. In dank chambers, cold clear water runs through the ferny channels which were once monks’ latrines. Above, buddleia sprouts in lofty cracks, and the red-brick traces of Paulet’s palace pock the grey stone like ruddy lesions, their manmade clay crumbling faster than the spiritual granite.

Like some coastal cliff, the strata of brick, tile and stone reveal the abbey as a gigantic fossil, a great gothic ammonite. The abbey’s story is carved on these walls, from its foundation stone cut with Henry III’s name to the initials of nineteenth-century tourists and now the hieroglyphic felt-tip of modern taggers. Walking in the grassy gap where the north transept once stood, my foot hits a piece of rubble: a fragment of encaustic floor tile which escaped those nineteenth-century robbers disguised as respectable-looking people. Decorated with a fleur-de-lys, its colours imbedded in the ceramic, it weighs heavy in my hand. How much longer will this building stand, these towering chunks of stone that seem only tentatively held together by medieval mortar? For all its tribulations, Netley’s abbey endures. Sanctified and plundered, hymned and neglected, it is still a mysterious, elusive place. Like some forgotten countess sequestered in a bosky lair, it draws the romantic past around itself, and leaves the modern world behind.

Never quite making up its mind to be a village, Netley spreads fitfully along the shore, shadowing the low cliffs buttressed by furze and pine. Hidden by rhododendron and laurel from the road, the fort built by Paulet also became a house,* gothicised by Sedding, the prolific nineteenth-century architect, for the Crichton family. Here they entertained their friends Robert Baden Powell – who spent his honeymoon at the castle – and Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter Princess Alice, whose lady-in-waiting married their son. But their genteel life of garden parties, yacht races and local munificence had long since faded by the 1970s, when Netley Castle became a nursing home where Peter and I visited our ailing deputy headmaster, attending his bedside in a dark-panelled room as he sipped his whisky, still fearful of his leather girlfriends.

On Friday nights, dressed up to look as old as we could, Peter and I would walk through the village, past its tiny, disused 1930s cinema, its working men’s club and its little garage and shops to the pub at the end, the Prince Consort, where, in our Oxford bags, we aspired to decadent sophistication by drinking acid-yellow Pernod and crimson Campari. A new subversion had arrived in my bedroom, a flame-haired alien in a red telephone box. I played Ziggy Stardust over and over again on my primitive one-speaker cassette recorder with the volume wheel pushed as far as it would go, headphones on, miming in the mirror to the apocalyptic fantasy of ‘Five Years’.

Alongside my pin-ups of Bowie, with his kohl’d eyes, ice-blue satin suit and lamé ties, were pictures of Roxy Music, fellow time travellers in an alternative universe of decadence. One morning Peter brought the first Roxy album to school, and before class we stood by our desks admiring the gatefold sleeve. Inside was Bryan Ferry in tigerskin bomber jacket and blue-black quiff, and Eno in leopardskin and eye-liner, denizens of a fantastic night club, while splayed on the front cover was a kitsch goddess in a white Fifties swim suit with pink and blue satin edging, all pout and décolletage, her teeth bared in a cerise come-on, an ironic gold disc at her silver-platformed feet.

It was this vision of Sodom and Gomorrah that our maths master saw as he marched past the corridor, looking in through his round NHS spectacles and over the half-glazed wall. He dashed into the classroom and knocked the record sleeve from our hands. ‘I’m a man’, he hissed like a pressure cooker, a characteristic of his desperate but doomed attempts to control his temper. ‘I don’t need to look at pictures of women.’ The irony, of which neither he nor we had been conscious, was that in fact our sin was much greater: the object of our admiration was a gallery of men in satin and mascara.

Three years later, we left school. Peter went to university for two terms, but was lured away by North Sea oil, diving in murky waters to earn thousands of pounds. I was steered away from art school to study for a proper degree at a college which my uncle had attended – yet another Catholic establishment, also called St Mary’s, and run by religious in the suburbs of London. It was surreal to attend seminars on Women in Love in which one’s fellow students were nuns in habits and wimples. But then, St Mary’s former owner would have appreciated this particular scene: the college occupied the building that had been Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.

At night, after the bar closed and emboldened by the decadent fumes of Pernod, I’d steal into the eighteenth-century house, which was connected to the halls of residence by a brown lino passageway. It was as though I’d emerged from a semi-detached villa into a bit of Windsor Castle. At one end of a great gilt and mirrored chamber, a curved door opened into a round turret room opulently hung in swags of blue velvet, where Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, Victorian chatelaine of Strawberry Hill, supposed mistress to Edward VII and a dabbler in the occult (like the Duchess of Devonshire before her) was said to have conducted seances. Lady Elizabeth had married her cousin, the 4th Earl Waldegrave, while her mother was the love child of Sir Edward Walpole, second son of the Earl of Orford, Horace Walpole’s heir. By strange synchronicity, her family had owned Mayfield, the Weston estate they had acquired in 1854 from the Chamberlaynes.

It wasn’t difficult to bring The Castle of Otranto to life here, in its birthplace. Even the men’s halls of residence, constructed when, like my old school, the house had become a Catholic seminary, had been built by the firm of Pugin and Pugin. The rooms were consequently narrow and cell-like, designed to contain the passions of a would-be priest, and across the corridor was a communal shower room with its thick dividing walls apparently made of dark, institutional stone, its taps dripping, the odd item of clothing – a pair of football shorts, socks or a towel – left behind on the benches.

Outside the window, wide lawns insulated Walpole’s fantastic creation from the suburbia beyond, and in my cubbyhole I read Gormenghast, conflating Peake’s 1940s gothic with the lapidiary prose of Denton Welch, whose Voice Through a Cloud I’d found in a jumble sale. Steerpike’s pinched cheekbones and Satanic stare anticipated another cult hero, Johnny Rotten, and in a world of three-day strikes and power-cuts, the present promised no future. Yet there was still the past to deal with. On visits home to Southampton – often coinciding with Peter’s return from Aberdeen, his pockets bulging with money – I’d return to Netley. Now it was not the abbey which preoccupied me, but the building which seemed to have inherited its gothic spirit: the Royal Victoria Military Hospital.