First There Is A Mountain...

When I first arrived in Southampton in 1984, I was surprised to discover from my parents that we had a family connection with the city. It seems my grandparents had moved here in 1939, leaving jobs in the publisher J.M. Dent's Temple Press in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, for Southampton's Shirley Press. They lived in an area known as Millbrook, close to the docks. However, after both they and the Shirley Press were bombed out in the 1940 Blitz, they began to work in the construction of Spitfires instead, elements of which were distributed around various factories and facilities in the Southampton area as security against further bombing, and included a dairy and a local stately home.

My grandfather, who had survived WW1 as an infantry sergeant, must have felt it was a bit much, getting such an intense second round of unfriendly attention later in life. As, presumably, did many thousands of others: the Home Guard they formed under threat of imminent invasion was no joke, however it may be parodied in retrospect, but was a well-organised local militia of experienced, angry, and determined men. Millbrook and the docks were my grandfather's unit's patch to defend.

A walk that I do every once in a while takes me on a 4 mile circuit down through Millbrook towards the waterfront, where there is another sports ground, much smaller than the one mentioned in the previous post – about the size of a generous school playing-field, in fact – squeezed between an industrial estate and a major road intersection, and separated from the docks by railway lines. It's not a place you'd choose to engage in aerobic sports, frankly. In a window of bright weather on Thursday I took the opportunity to get down there, and was rewarded with some raking, late-afternoon sunshine, and dramatic long shadows stretching across the grass; the sort of conditions where the photographs pretty much take themselves, really. There was just me, some dog-walkers, and the usual noisy congregations of seagulls. I imagine it's rather different at the weekend.

Back in 1984, you could still cross various footbridges over the railway lines directly into the docks and wander about, within touching distance of the mighty steel hulls of moored cargo ships. In the days before containerisation, I imagine hundreds of dock-workers would stream over these bridges every morning. No longer: lading and unlading container ships is not a labour-intensive business, and the docks are a high-security area, fenced off and rigorously policed. So, for the majority of the population of this once proudly maritime city, those gigantic cranes are merely a constant sight on the skyline, and not a reassuring signifier of identity and employment.

In fact, I expect most people have stopped even noticing them, in the same way you can stop noticing any permanent landscape feature, even something as dramatic as a mountain range. I remember collecting my hire-car at Innsbruck airport in Austria when I arrived there for a photographic residency in 2014, and enthusing about the spectacular backdrop to the reception guy. He was a German, and said, "Yes, they are amazing, aren't they? But once you've been here for a while, they just seem to disappear... You seeing them for the first time has reminded me how amazing they really are!"