Soul Quest

In a previous post (Solent Soul Suite) I described a potential project, a tentative search for the "soul" of the city of Southampton, which seems to have gone missing somewhere around 1960, having received a bit of a pasting during the Blitz of 1940. It seemed one good initial search strategy would be to become a tourist in my own town, and to do the things I would do if, by some miscalculation, I had ended up here on holiday. So, a couple of times in recent weeks, I've taken myself down to that part of the waterfront which is under development as a residential, business, and leisure district, and relatively open to mooching about with a camera.

It seems quite a transformation has been going on. It's been a while since I was last down in Ocean Village, as it is known, and the developers have been busy. Where there were once wind-blown vacant lots huge high-rise blocks have appeared, with bars and restaurants at ground level, and upscale apartments and office space above. Private residential estates have been packed in around the old dockside, which has been rebranded as a "marina" and now gleams with the hulls of yachts and cruisers, including some Trump-sized vessels that could accommodate a lobbying-party for the entire House of Commons. The only things missing are (a) tourists, and (b) a suitable climate. Admittedly, the centre of Southampton is Party Town for a substantial stretch of the South Coast, but why anyone would want to freeze their kneecaps off in a brisk onshore breeze carrying fumes from the Fawley Refinery while being deafened by the tintinnabulation of halyards slapping a hundred-odd metal masts is a mystery to me.

Soul-wise, whether this makeover will ever become the "real" Southampton only time will tell. Out of sight, round the bend, and behind razor-wire topped fences the business of docking, resupplying, lading and unlading improbably large cruise and container ships carries on regardless. You can still be held up for 10 minutes or more as an endless freight train rumbles into the docks across the only road into the area. On the other side of Southampton Water sits the industrial sprawl of Fawley Refinery. Further round the other way the mighty curve of the Itchen Bridge carries commuter traffic over the river, and near and beneath the bridge little industrial units continue to make and fix things. A little further up the Itchen the enormous St. Mary's Stadium of Southampton FC is located. It's hard not to feel that true traces of a city's soul may be more reliably sensed in these places, rather than down by the marina. But it's a start.

The Itchen Bridge and the new stadium are both emblematic of the continual process of change from "old" Southampton to "new" Southampton; a process which, obviously, is going on in all towns everywhere all the time, but which, here as elsewhere, seems also to have broken some essential element of civic pride and continuity. Any genuine local of my age would recall that, before the bridge was opened in 1977, there was a chain ferry across the Itchen, the so-called Floating Bridge. It had been there, in various incarnations, since 1838, which would make it venerable by most standards, but was clearly inadequate for the needs of modern-day traffic. In fact, the Floating Bridge was itself a compromise, a substitute for a bridge proposed in 1833, but opposed by other local interests, not least the company operating the rival bridge a little upriver at Northam.

Photographically, this sort of thing is hard to express. Bits and pieces of "old" Southampton survive, but need substantial interpretation. A case in point: towards the end of my recent explorations down near the Itchen Bridge, a guy pulled out of a nearby gate in his car and, seeing me, slowed to a halt and rolled down his window. It turned out he was the Scoutmaster of the local Sea Scouts, and was worried I might be sizing the area up for yet more development. On hearing about my actual mission, he started to fill me in on the significance of the local remains. Those tracks on a ramp running into the water? That's where they built Mulberry harbours for D-Day. And that bus-shelter thingie over there? That's the Cross House, built as a place for people waiting to be ferried over the river, back before land was reclaimed to make the current shoreline. It was first mentioned in the sixteenth century, but is probably mediaeval, possibly repurposed from a boundary cross. Now that's old. But it's also isolated nowhere near anywhere any tourist would ever show up: at the side of a dead-end road running through industrial units to a car-park. Which is where I came in.