Shipshaped

I have lived on the south coast in Southampton for forty years now. That's twice as long as I lived in my home town of Stevenage, 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.

Southampton is that sort of place, I think: a city with a slightly out-of-focus identity, which seems never quite to have 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 day-hired manual workers would troop down every day into the dockside area to service cargo ships of every description arriving from and destined for every part of the world, containerisation meant that now it's mainly just crane operators, lorry drivers, and office workers who get to penetrate beyond the security gates. If it weren't for the massive cranes on the horizon, the occasional foghorns at night, or the 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 might 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 that security concerns mean access is firmly closed off to anyone not employed within the port perimeter. But when I first arrived in the city, 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 doubt very much than many of today's 260,000-plus inhabitants give even a passing thought to the maritime aspect of their city.

Of course, the Southampton I know is really just a partial cross-section, a sample defined by my habitual movements and photographic explorations around town. 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. Of these two halves, I know the western one far better. Thrust through the middle of it is a massive wedge of green space, Southampton Common, that divides it again into two: a boon for walks and fresh air, but an obstacle when you need to drive from one side of town to the other. Again, I'm more familiar with the western side of that second divide, although the university where I used to work lies just to the east of it.

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 1960s-built, pedestrianised town centre – quite close to the waterfront but absolutely separate from it – which is also just like those in other bomb-damaged cities like Bristol or Birmingham, where it must have seemed like a good opportunity 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, 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 entrance into the mediaeval city. Inevitably, the city-centre shops have themselves since been usurped by a shopping mall built in 1990, West Quay, that draws traffic in from miles around, but at the same time drains the life out of the surrounding area.

There is also another, newer Southampton, which you wouldn't really know was there unless you happened to be rather wealthy, or looking for the sort of nightlife that has become essential to the young. I certainly didn't know about it, until I decided that – living in a major port – I really ought to be taking more photographs of the waterfront. What I then discovered was that although industry has retreated from down there, particularly from around the confluence of the Itchen and Southampton Water, intensive development has been taking its place. 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, as well as a marina full of gleaming yachts. I suppose the people living in these apartment blocks may be some of the very few Southampton city residents to have a view of the actual sea, several miles downriver.

Mike Chisholm 2024