Within Walls

More ports. There's a second post on Hamburg which has fallen down the back of the sofa because I started it weeks ago - here it is. There will be some more, ah, exotic posts on here soonish, but for the moment my inclinations are pulling me somewhere more familiar. 'What do you think of the walled Old Town?' asked Matt Poacher a little while ago about one of my Southampton writings. See, Southampton has the largest stretch of medieval walls in the UK, outside of York. The truth be told, apart from post-wedding boozing and visits to Eric Lyons' Castle House, I don't spend much time there, and as with Southampton University, more fool me, as it's actually a very smart (if perhaps unintentional) bit of townscape in the Gordon Cullen/Pevsnerian sense, but architecture is fairly little to do with what makes it good. The relevance of this with reference to the demise of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment will be an additional subject. This post, even more than with Oxford, is indebted to Pevsner's half-finished Visual Planning and the Picturesque.

It starts, as it should, with an overhead walkway, joining up two broken parts of the walls, alongside a derelict 60s building with 2001 windows; the view is terminated in typical townscape style with a tower, which here is Lyons' council slab block, the area's best building. You have to ignore WestQuay for this walk to be enjoyable, but after that, pickings here are rich - what is interesting about this place is the various attempts to build within and around ruination and fragmentation, some of them quite successful.

Firstly, there's some of your actual architecture here, courtesy of non-Smithsons-employing Brutalists Lyons Israel Ellis - simple, robust blocks placed in amongst the bombed-out fragments of Georgian and Victorian housing - but they pick up the rhythm and unpretentious vigour of the surrounding buildings. Crucially, they don't pretend to be suburban or small-town.

This is exactly what all the subsequent architecture does, and to enjoy it this fact has to be accepted. Most of it is 1980s housing association design, deeply provincial, anti-urban and occasionally rather twee - but what it does, and does well, is set up interestingly reciprocal spaces, create some sort of intrigue in the movement uphill, and framing some unusually (for the south of England) generous public spaces. Here, for instance, the 80s blocks are genuinely quite pretty in their interaction with the sloping site and the existing remnants.

The walls themselves were restored by Leon Berger during his heroic 50s-60s tenure as head of the City Architects Department, and they're pieced together in an unassuming and frankly Brutalist manner, the roughness of the concrete linking bridges fitting the functionalist harshness of the 13th century encampment very nicely.

What is even better is the way that they really encourage exploration - there's an invitation to try to find out how to get under and around these bridges, and when I was little this was exciting stuff - a playground in the truest sense, because it didn't patronise, because it felt like a discovery.

The places where Wall meets building are always slightly disappointing - the architectural form, after the 1960s, is always a little too close to the Holiday Village genre for my taste, and the architects clearly haven't noticed that there's little pretty about a ruined fortress if you actuallylook at it, rather than have the instant ooh-look-heritage reaction. Again, what saves this is something non-architectural...

...the passage under the blocks, which leads to the main street. This is a classic Townscape approach, a refreshingly unpatrolled and unpoliced way of walking, and designing via contrasts rather than being In Keeping.

It ends at the (passenger, not container) port, and with a medieval storehouse which is now used as the Maritime Museum; there are two salient things in here, an exhibit on the Titanic (obviously) and a scale model of the port in the 1930s, a strikingly beautiful but all-but-unphotographable thing. It also has the most capricious opening hours of any museum in the UK.

But perhaps what makes this a mini-masterpiece of Townscape is the contrast with what comes after, or what goes alongside - a large area of land reclaimed in the 1930s, which is now the dispersed, low-density drosscape of the Pirelli site and its hinterland, which regular readers will be aware is a personal bete noire that need not be discussed further here.

The walls do at least provide a vantage point that would be perfect for snipers. This was, obviously, the place's original function - to aim arrows at the French marauders. Now the same could be productively perpetrated against those coming in on business from the New Forest.

Southampton is pockmarked with places where you can mourn the future - one of them is just behind the De Vere hotel. When this was constructed, the building below was demolished.

(image via Flickr user Robert R&N)

The walled city has a forgotten feeling which makes it by far the most pleasant place to walk in the city centre, the total lack of chain pubs, chain stores and marauding students and/or locals making it so pleasant you could even forget you were in Southampton. This has been a little disrupted by something called 'The French Quarter'.

I dismissed these blocks, so arrogantly bland in such a unique area, so unwilling to embrace the manifold possibilities of the fragmented and ruined context, as 'rote yuppiedromes' in BD a while ago, and a partner at John Thompson wrote in defence:

Our scheme in Southampton’s French Quarter, mentioned in your feature last week, offers truly mixed uses, mixed tenure and tenure-blind accommodation. It also supports commercial office and retail, sheltered and affordable rented accommodation, shared ownership and outright sale homes — the sale units have all sold faster than other similar developments. Rather like dropping in a missing piece of the jigsaw, it has also repaired a historic piece of Southampton’s Old Town, knitting the development back into the community — including removing a chunk of 1960s “highway engineer’s dream”, a six-lane carriageway, and replacing it with a piece of responsive urbanism. It isn’t about “starchitecture”, nor about great Corbusian-friendly slabs of flats that Cabe can get overexcited about — and which would probably be demolished in 20 years. It may not be by the Smithsons or one of the tax-dodging fancy ones, but it is architecture that works, that people want to live in, and that hopefully will still be working in 50-100 years.

You see, to me this appeared to be a straightforward, shoddy, stack-em-up cheap bit of pseudo-vernacular, with no council housing included, that was unworthy of a once-at-least-almost-great city, a design which would have been exactly the same anywhere in the UK, but apparently not. The 'partial removal' of the carriageway that they seem so proud of pales rather in comparison with the fact that, as you can see from these pictures, the area replaces the urbanism of the 60s and the 80s, both of which were sensitive here, in their very different ways, both defined by permeable spaces and civic virtues, with bland blocks hugging the street line, with the only spaces inbetween the vast surface car parks. Yet, strangely, they seem so much more pleased with themselves than were the anonymous architects of the councils and the housing associations. Funny, that.

There is one fairly interesting new thing happening here, and that's a bit of city-branding - usually something I would disdain, but here at least it reminds the place that it is somewhere -which it is prone to forget. Part of this has been through typography and road signs, which may be signs to gigantic malls and midwestern Leisure Worlds, but it's a start. And to see Priestley here is appropriate...

You can still take a ship here - this is the new QE2, complete with retro-modernist red funnel. It won't take you to New York or anywhere useful, but on a vague cruise round nowhere in particular, for an extremely large sum of money. As ever, its huge scale and confidence are deeply incongruous in this stragglescape...

The photo above is taken in the vicinity of the first high-rise to be built here for a generation, which sits at the end of the old walled town, and which you can see below. Like the old town, it's an example of good ideas badly implemented (albeit here far worse). Of course it's right and just that the port-side should have some sort of monumental presence, something that announces urbanity and arrival - and you can imagine this was enough to sway CABE, because CABE didn't have the power to just tell the developers to hire a decent architect. As a silhouette, it's fine. The fact that it's a tacky, clichéd, forgettable Blairite craphouse of a tower was outside their remit - a tower was a good idea, wasn't it? Well, yes. The response to this sort of failure should have been to have given CABE some teeth (and to have sacked around half of its leadership) but instead it goes, in the 'bonfire of the quangos'. Here are some of the things that stayed.

Originally published on 2/11/10, at SDMYABT.

Don't Play the Step Game

Just look at the scene above. It's gorgeous, isn't it? If I'd taken it in monochrome (and was a better photographer), I could have pretended it was an out-take from, say, Maraid's Dad's Architecture Photos - a vision of idyllic postwar Albion, with rolling grassland, pretty of planting all around, and studious youth louchely reclining, presumably reading Pelican paperbacks. This landscape is round the corner from one of the five places where I grew up (this one through the decidedly formative ages of 12-16). I'd love to say that it is what formed my tastes, but it would be a fib.

This is Southampton University, a Russell Group research giant which just happens to be adjacent to a large council estate, more of which later. The University arose out of several additive stages; an early one in red brick in the 1930s, designed by the delightfully named local firm of Gutteridge and Gutteridge, with Giles Gilbert Scott as 'advisor'; concrete, stone and tile designed in the 60s by Basil Spence, with locals Ronald Sims; then a more recent New Labour-era unplanned accretion by Rick Mather, Nick Grimshaw and various nonentities. Even the latter is immeasurably better than anything recent in the city itself, but oddly, in my extensive writings on the place, I never talk of the university. It doesn't seem part of Southampton, at least as I think of it. I'm aware this makes no sense whatsoever.

I'm really not trying for pathos or the prolier-than-thou here, I swear - but there always seemed to be a kind of invisible block around this place, an aura of 'not for you' when I lived next door; this combined with the fact that I was usually too scared to walk up Burgess Road for other reasons. Since then I've avoided the place completely, except to occasionally observe bits of it from my Mum's car on the way to somewhere else. The only time I've ever properly walked through it is on the day I graduated from school in 1997, and my main memory then is of how American the open informality of the campus seemed, not resembling anything I'd seen in England; I got a bus to see Kenickie play live here about a year later, but remember nothing of the associated architecture. Until this visit, I hadn't even visited the John Hansard Gallery. So, the University gets only the most cursory mention in the 51 pages devoted to Southampton inThe Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, as does the adjacent estate. This post should be considered a pre-emptive footnote to said book, as it's now too late to incorporate my observations of these two places into the chapter.

More fool me, as in places, the architecture of Southampton University is enough to make you swoon. This is generally considered a lesser Spence work, and seldom gets into the recent books or archives that have accompanied his Wallpaper*-sponsored rehabilitation. From the little I remembered of it, I assumed this was the right judgement, but I was wrong, wrong wrong. The finest of the buildings is both terrifically simple and fiendishly complex, and sums up the virtues of the place. It's a long block which is, I think - Pevsner is oddly confusing here, maybe Lang Rabbie can step in the comments - a Common Room. In some views, like that above, it just floatson the greenery.

It's actually on several levels - walk up some steps and you get a view of the general idyll...

...from either direction, with the rectilinearity and the winding path a perfect contrivance...

...facing the obligatory, and here very elegant enigmatic Hepworthian sculpture....

...to the point where it finally meets what the New Urbanist dullards would consider a 'street', ie something with cars and shops on it. Here is a pool and another sculpture (again, it's hard to tell from Pevsner what/who exactly). It's extraordinary architecture, an incredibly simple thing morphing into several distinct views, all of them equally striking. Not all of it is this brilliant, but lots of it is...

There are a few towers dotted around the campus, and at Hyde Park Barracks Spence proved to be an extremely underrated designer of tall buildings; but the best of them isn't by Spence at all, but by the obscure Bournemouth architect Ronald Sims. Again, this is something I had seen a few times at a distance and thought might be vaguely interesting but never bothered to see properly, up close, as a pedestrian; but as soon as I surveyed the prospect below, there was again a reflux of astonishment.

With all its outgrowths of stairs and multiple levels I'm amazed it's still preserved - I suspect this complex is a disabled access nightmare, and Mathematics surely has the occasional student in a wheelchair. That aside, it's shudderingly dramatic, sculptural architecture, its concrete bristling with tempting tactility, alongside the Brutalist wet dream of a staircase which leads to a raised plaza on the third floor. Gobsmacking.

One building I remember both from being driven past it and from it being on the cover of the Pevsner Hampshire and the Isle of Wight volume is Spence's Nuffield Theatre, copper on brick. Again, looking properly at the thing reveals all sorts of drama and ambition - I'm not usually one for details, but the moment here where the copper façade opens out to form a doorway is a delight...the fencing is worrying, though - none of the University buildings are listed, and this being Southampton, there's surely an imperative to smash it up and shove something appalling in its place. But as said, this doesn't feel like Southampton to me. Not even student Southampton - it doesn't connect up with the lumpen boozy studentville of Portswood and Bevois Valley, nor the appalling vernacular student flats in the centre of town. It feels like a complete enclave, and most of the buildings seem to be remarkably well looked-after; it certainly hasn't had an influence on the buildings around it.

Another building I actually remember, and which actually has suffered slightly from the ravages of time, is the Faraday Tower - Spence again, a simple ribbon-windowed tower of laboratories veering towards midcentury conformity, but for its one extraordinary feature -it boasts, for reasons I could never work out, a three-storey cantilever to make it glare out especially bizarrely on the suburbia around. This at least is facing either a drastic façading or demolition. It once featured on a stamp. It gets extra Ghost Box points for apparently having an unused Reactor in the basement.

The recent buildings are nothing special, but if I saw them in the centre of town I'd be quite pleased - they at least seem like modern architecture of some (unspectacular) kind, and they pay some sort of recognition to Spence et al rather than trying to sweep their work away in favour of Proper Streets. It seems Russell Group Universities can get away with being marginally ambitious and civilised, without a Management Consultant in the background telling them to fire everyone and hire Capita.

The earlier, '30s Gutteridge/Scott parts of the place are not especially interesting, competent examples of Scott's Moderne/Gothic/Brick Expressionist mannerism. Pevsner/David Lloyd compare one of their buildings here to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, which suggests they'd hit the booze even more heavily than Nairn. This one has a top anticontextual entrance, presumably added by Spence in the '60s.

Practically at the exact same time that this redbrick University was being built at the edge of Southampton Common, Southampton City Council designed its own greenfield enclave, the Flower Estate, as given meaningless roots-flexing namechecking by me on this blog on a few occasions, to the entirely nonplussed reaction of readers unfamiliar with Southampton. This bit of the pavement is the best clue to the age of the place.

I was walking round here with Pyzikówna, and given what I remember of it, I was immediately obnoxiously paranoid - 'don't speak too loudly, don't draw any attention to us'. The first view of the estate from Burgess Road confirmed to stereotype - incredibly cheap-looking grey harling, the slurry slathered onto the brick presumably part of the 'vernacular' in the far North or parts of Scotland, but looking utterly bizarre on the south coast, particularly on this sunny day - with a car parked on the 'front garden'. Most of the Flower Estate is made up of '30s semis, presumably gesturing at Letchworth and the Garden Cities, but resembling more precisely Wythenshawe, Becontree or its Sheffield namesake. Certainly this place doesn't feel like The South as it's commonly understood - it's Rita Sue and Bob Too territory. But there's only a little more stereotypical unpleasantness in this post, although this time fairly temporary....

The irony is that nobody gave us a funny look, nobody seemed at all bothered by our presence there, and certainly nobody remembered me from 13 years ago. On a walk a few months earlier in Warsaw, I'd been less than shocked by the alleged inhumanity of the place where she grew up, and this was her opportunity to return the favour, which she most certainly did. I suppose in either case, the architecture is not really the reason why they were horrible places to grow up. The Flower Estate is made up of a couple of building types - the semis and a few half-terraces, always interrupted to stop 'monotony' (i.e, any coherence or structure) and it is built into a rather lovely valley, whose contours it doesn't bother to do anything remotely interesting with, preferring to loop round and round wanly, without variation or drama; after seeing what Basil Spence could do with a slope just round the corner, the lack of wit or imagination is even more glaring.

Neville Chamberlain, under whom lots of these places were built, claimed that every one of them turned a potential proletarian 'revolutionary' into a 'citizen'. There's no pubs, needless to say, excepting a giant developer's Tudor roadhouse on the estate's edges which is now a McDonalds; there's a school, and a church, and not far away, the Ford Transit factory, which you can see below, the giant windowless white box nearly merging into the sky over Daisy Dip - the admittedly impressive park which is at the estate's centre, attempting to make up for the fact that there are no trees elsewhere in this 'garden suburb'. Basically, this estate represented everything the designers of social housing between the 40s and 70s tried not to do, and - at least on aesthetic grounds - I think they were entirely correct in their scorn.

Unlike the University, though, one part of the estate actually is listed - the aforementioned church, designed in 1933 by N.F Cachemaille-Day, an interwar ecclesiastical architect who, unlike the estate itself, was deeply continental in his architectural affiliations. So it's odd to see him doing something so insufferably English, resorting to something Betjeman might write a poem about - a diminutive Castle Keep to tower over the ersatz village.



So it's not apocalyptic, there's no burning cars to be seen, and no skinheads (they are there in the Estate's presence on Google Streetview, amusingly enough) at least not on this particular day. I don't think the lack of intimidation is because the place has changed that much, but because nobody knows who I am here anymore - everybody knowing who you are is a deeply overrated virtue, something nostalgically longed for in Hoggart-world, but when you're a teenager with funny hair who is useless in a scrap, it's a horrible thing. 'Community' here, as I remember it, proceeded via exclusion and negation - we are x, you are not, so fuck you. No doubt the same effect could have been replicated somewhere more architecturally ambitious, but I'm not entirely sure - there's something about the smallness and meanness of the place which seems to encourage small-mindedness. It might imitate the more generous vernacular cottages of Letchworth or wherever, but look at the shabbiness and parsimony of the proportions, the windows that are no more spacious than those in a back-to-back and much less so than in the Edwardian terraces up the road, the pretentious little details around the entrance...it all seems so patronising - here you go, here's your little house, little person.

For what it's worth, I lived in the white house in the terrace above. We weren't council tenants - that would come later - but were living in one of the houses that someone had bought on Right to Buy and then sold off. Accordingly, although we were paying less than we would to live practically anywhere else in town on the open market, we were paying considerably more than our next-door neighbours, something presumably compensated for by the clean whitewash - perhaps this bit of desperate aesthetic distinguishing indulged in by our landlord had subliminally influenced everyone to think I thought I was above everyone else, who knows...I have stories I could tell about this place, about impetigo spread as a pestilent game of 'it', about 30-year old skinheads threatening violence upon 13 year-olds for playing loud music, other stories rather less amusing; but I won't. The only bit of real menace or weirdness I could garner from this brief early summer visit was this bit of graffiti.

It's pretty clear and assertive in making its case. According to Google, the Step Game is a game for autistic children. The site says it 'teaches autistic children how to give and understand directions. Stand on the bottom of a staircase with your child and give the first command. You can mix up the commands to involve your child's favorite activity such as "twirl step," "bark like a dog step," or "high five step." You and your child will perform the command, then go to the next step. Celebrate when you reach the top of the stairs then race down to the bottom and switch roles with your child and let her come up with the commands this time.'

Originally published at Sit Down, Man on 14/6/10.