Old and New

Don't get me wrong on the nature of my proposed Southampton "quest". Although I am a self-declared admirer of the worn and torn over the brand spanking new, I'm not saying that "old" has any necessary correspondence with "soul". Quite often, the appeal of such battered remnants is quite the opposite of that, a sort of orphaned incongruity that is far from comforting, and that expresses the feelings of alienation in a world that is becoming inhospitable and incomprehensible that most of feel from time to time as we get older. We're not talking about favourite old sweaters here; we're talking about the coherence and continuity of civic awareness and culture that make, say, Liverpool "Liverpool", or Bristol "Bristol".

The feeling that Southampton is not, or is no longer "Southampton" may be purely personal, of course. Certain crucial areas of experience are off-limits to me. I will never know what it is like to have grown up here, to have extended family nearby, to have played in these parks and streets, or to have attended local schools, with strong views on their relative merits and mythologies. I cannot enter the thriving docks as I don't have any business there that would get me through the security gates. I have no interest in the lively clubbing scene that emerges between 11 p.m. and 3:00 a.m., leaving its unmissable traces in the streets of the city centre, although I suppose if I wanted to risk life and limb I could attempt to document the late-night mayhem that, I am told, erupts reliably when the clubs shut. Even though I arrived here in 1984, the year the Saints were riding high in the old First Division, I have never once attended a football match, either at the Dell or the new St. Mary's Stadium, and probably never will; I cannot even be bothered to check the team's latest performance on a Saturday. Does this make me less of a "Sotonian"? Probably yes; incomers generally remain incomers. But then I also cannot know what that fully 10% of our population who have come from Poland and other Eastern European countries in recent years make of the city. They already have their own network of shops, and so overfill the local Catholic church at Christmas that the congregation congregates out on the street. Obviously, there are many versions of the city, some more authentic than others, but I have never sensed that they cohere into anything resembling a true civic identity.

I don't think this was always the case, however, and this is where "old" does come in. There are stretches of the city centre where buildings that were not destroyed by the 1940 Blitz or the redevelopers of the 1960s still stand, and many of them are truly outstanding examples of civic architecture. Once, on this evidence, there was money and pride to spare. There are some elegant Georgian terraces, for example (now mainly occupied by legal firms); there are marvellous pubs and hotels and shops and banks with elaborate exteriors, sometimes surviving with their original function and context intact, but more often than not repurposed as clubs and restaurants and sitting uncomfortably next to the thoughtless, off-the-peg architecture of modern retail outlets.

At the more monumental end of the spectrum, there is an extraordinary sculpted memorial to the many Southampton crewmen who went down on the Titanic in 1912, just across the road from an elegant cenotaph inscribed with the names of the men who died in 1914-18, designed by Lutyens and the model for the larger version in London's Whitehall. Then, looming gigantically but somehow hidden in plain sight, there are the remnants of the original mediaeval city wall and the twin drum towers of the Norman Bargate, which was at some point chosen by the Council as the city's logo (accompanied by a tower-block and a tree – ah, symbolism!). This odd device has replaced the city coat of arms on everything from council vans to headed notepaper. In fact, look, there it is on the rubbish bin at the extreme bottom right in my panorama of that magnificent tiled pub frontage below, a stone's throw from the waterfront – where ferries used to leave for France and passenger boats sailed for the farthest reaches of the Empire – and opposite the original railway station, where passengers and, at times, soldiers from all over the country arrived before embarkation. It's not hard to imagine taking pride in a prosperous and purposeful city that once looked like this, though, is it?