The Dock of the Bay

I have lived on the south coast in Southampton for ... (opens calculator) ... Good Lord, thirty-nine years now. That's twice as long as I lived in my home town, and over four times the length of time I have lived anywhere else. And yet, despite many years of exploration in pursuit of photographs, I feel I barely know the place and would hesitate to call it "home" (as, I suspect, would our children, both actually born and raised here).

It's that sort of place, I think: a city with an out-of-focus identity, which has never really come to terms with the destruction wrought upon it during WW2 or the collapse of the work market tied to the docks and commercial shipping after the 1960s. Where once crowds of skilled manual workers would troop down every day into the dockside area to load and unload (lade and unlade?) cargo ships of every description arriving from and destined to every part of the world, containerisation has meant that now it's just crane operators, lorry drivers, and office workers who get to penetrate beyond the security gates. If it wasn't for the massive cranes on the horizon, the occasional foghorns at night, or the more frequent crackle and bang of the fireworks let off by visiting cruise-liners (not to mention the endless to and fro traffic of container lorries and car transporters) you'd never guess you were living in one of the world's major ports.

I imagine the same is true of all modern sea-cities, now security concerns mean access to anyone not employed within the port perimeter is firmly closed off. When I first arrived here, in 1984, you could still cross a footbridge over the railway and stroll around the dockside on a Sunday afternoon, peer into the massive void of the dry dock, and experience the awe-inspiring sensation of standing next to the cliff-like hulls of moored ocean-going ships; I wish I'd been carrying a camera in those days. That said, unless you're some solitary soul intending to spend the day sitting on the dock of the bay, there's not much reason to want to make the effort. Ports tend to be situated on large river estuaries, and these are messy, tidal, marshy places lacking the easy charms of sandy beaches and accessible seafronts – Southampton Water is not anywhere a sane person would want to swim – and I doubt very much than many of today's inhabitants give even a passing thought to the maritime aspect of their city.

The Southampton I know best (or "Soton" as it tends to be abbreviated) is really just a partial cross-section, a sample defined by my habitual movements around the place. Like so many long-established trading settlements, the city is divided into two substantial halves by a river, in this case the Itchen, flowing south from Winchester. The eastern half is pretty much terra incognita to me: who knows what may be going on over there? Thrust through the middle of the more familiar western half is a massive wedge of green space, the Common, that divides it again into two: a boon for walks and fresh air, but a bloody nuisance if you need to drive from one side of town to the other. Again, I'm more familiar with the western side of that divide, although the university where I used to work lies just to the east. Although the docks are the obvious focal point, geographically and economically, the city as actually inhabited is really a series of suburbs and housing estates built in the 1930s and the post-war period, identical to those in pretty much any other British town you care to name: street after street of terraced and semi-detached houses.

On the western side these streets tend to slope down towards the docks and a soulless 1960s-built pedestrianised town centre – quite close to the waterfront, but absolutely separate from it – one which is also just like those in other bomb-damaged cities like Bristol or Birmingham, where it must have seemed like a good idea at the time to bulldoze everything and build anew. The town centre does still contain within it some evidence of the pre-war world it replaced, however: a few elegant Georgian terraces, now mainly occupied by legal firms, some Victorian streets and buildings of various sizes and states of dilapidation, and some intriguing remnants of the city's former historic and commercial glory, such as sections of the original massive town wall and the Bargate, once the main gateway into the mediaeval city. Inevitably, these city-centre shops have themselves since been usurped by an even more soulless enclosed shopping mall, West Quay, that sucks traffic in from miles around, at the same time as it sucks the life out of the surrounding area. So, to that extent Southampton is a fairly typical example of any British city with a bit of a past, you might say.

But there is another Southampton. You wouldn't really know it was there unless you happened to be looking for the sort of meretricious nightlife that has become essential to the young, or simply rather wealthy. I certainly didn't know, until I decided that – living in a major port and all – I really ought to be taking more photographs of the waterfront. What I then discovered was that industry has retreated from down there, particularly from around the confluence of the Itchen and Southampton Water, and intensive development has been taking place. It's changed a lot since I used to drop my kids off at the Harbour Lights cinema, although not in my view for the better. There are now massive blocks of "luxury" apartments towering over what has come to be called Ocean Village, with its  numerous restaurants, clubs, and "leisure facilities", and a marina full of gleaming yachts. To me, the whole place reeks of a repellent glass-and-chrome ephemerality, like a flashy piece of 1980s hi-tech, replete with the sort of features that Alan Sugar, of Amstrad fame, used to call "the mug's eyeful". It must be like living inside an aquarium or, worse, an ultra-modern office block way up there, perched in an edifice that looms over the waterfront like some malevolent watchtower or panopticon. I suppose these must at least be some of the very few Southampton residents to have a view of the actual sea, several miles downriver. I hope they think it's worth whatever price they paid for the privilege.

So why am I telling you about this? Simply because it struck me that, despite having lived and worked and photographed here for nearly forty years, I have never really put a "Southampton" project together, or even managed to show much work locally. I have plenty of material, obviously, but it's never enough just to compile a "best of" selection of views of a location, if you want anyone to pay attention. These days, especially, some sort of thematic thread is needed, on which to string your pretty beads. I think I've come up with a good one, but I'm going to keep quiet about it for now, as nothing drains the life out of a new project quite like telling everyone all about it before you've really got started. Although if you read between the lines of what I've written above, you might get a hint of what I have in mind. For now, though, it will have to remain a case of sitting patiently on the dock of the bay, waiting for this particular ship to roll into port.