grimy sheds of the Mountbatten Retail Park. The most immediately noticeable urban artefacts are the hotels. Hotels are, in my experience, the most reliably awful examples of British architecture built in the last thirty years, closely followed by the similar typology of Halls of Residence. Is this to do with some kind of national aversion to the concept of hospitality? Do their developers worry that architecture might deter custom? Or are they just unbelievably tight-fisted? This particular cluster of hotels was lucky enough to receive a specific denunciation from the hilarious, depressing weblog Bad British Architecture— a Novotel and an Ibis, similarly lumpen and blocky, aptly described by the blog’s writer the ‘Ghost of Nairn’ as ‘simply incompetent building, let alone design’. Its astounding crapness makes you wonder if there is a deliberate policy of discouraging cruise passengers from actually staying in the city. Across the road from them a Police Operational Command Unit is being erected to designs by multinational giants of shit Broadway Malyan. The site currently consists of a concrete frame and some brickwork, presumably to be In Keeping with something or other. There’s an onsite Christmas tree. This seasonal jollity is not continued by the police advertisements outside the station itself, which are all, rather staggeringly, about knives and knife crime, presenting those driving in from the M27 with another reason to avoid venturing any further than the malls.
The major dockside building is the Solent Flour Mills, which, remarkably enough, is still working. Equally remarkably, there have to my knowledge been no proposals to turn it into a lottery-funded art gallery. It’s absolutely huge, and of course inaccessible to the public. The dock gates were built around the same time in the early 1930s. The clocks have all had their hands removed. The most salient thing about industrial architecture after Fordism, the old form of industrial organization based on centralization, high wages, collective bargaining and intensive, linear mass production, is the changeover from an architecture of light to an architecture of windowless enclosure. The Solent Mills are a fine example of a Fordist ‘daylight factory’, notable as much for expanses of glass as for expanses of brick. Conversely, post-Fordist industry (there is such a thing—the presumption that post-Fordist automatically equals post-industrial is seldom correct) is marked by sheds without glass, where the ideology of transparency is transferred to financial capital and its shiny office blocks. Even Ford’s own Transit works in the suburbs are windowless, a 1990s steel box looming over the top-lit earlier factory buildings. The de-industrialization of Southampton (which happened in train with the intensified automation of the container port) means that there are few windowless industrial sheds in the centre of town. There are, however, windowless leisure sheds.
Solent Flour Mills
Ford showrooms, Shirley
The biggest of these is Leisure World, an ‘adaptive reuse’ of a former automated warehouse that in the late 1990s was transformed into a gigantic shed of entertainment: nightclubs, chain restaurants, and a multiplex, with lots and lots of car parking. The entrance is framed on one side by a casino, one of several in the centre, presumably intended for the cruise passengers; and on the other by ‘Quayside’, a simulacrum Victorian pub for an area which was under water in the Victorian era. The car park of Leisure World is one of the few places where certain of the dock’s architectural features reveal themselves—the cyclopean scale of the Flour Mills, for one, and for another, the pathetic tin canopy of the City Cruise Terminal. I spent much time walking round said car park with a camera, where I saw among other things that the nightclubs—formerly Ikon and Diva—are now called ‘Reykjavik Icehouse’ and ‘New York Disco’, perhaps in some partial memory of the thousands of New Yorkers who passed through this city in the first half of the last century. You will note the lack of photographs of any of these things. As I take a picture of the wavy roof of Ikea from behind the Leisure Container, a voice from behind me says ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I get out my NUJ Press Pass, which says on the back that the Police Federation recognizes me as a ‘bona fide news gatherer’. ‘That’s nice,’ he says when I get out the card. ‘But have you got permission?’ ‘What, to take photos in a car park?’ ‘This is private property. You have to have permission.’ He then makes me delete the photographs I took in the car park from the digital camera, one by one, before I am allowed out onto the ‘street’.
Leisure World
Quayside Pub
Castle House vs the De Vere
Except there is no street here. This whole gigantic site is designed solely for the car, so my being a pedestrian is already suspicious, impeccably white and well-spoken though I may be. There are two recent buildings as part of this spreading mass of shed: one for Ikea, which includes some public art on the wooden spirals of its car park; and another for cruise operator Carnival, which, with its high-tech cribbings, is almost a work of architecture, although not a work of urban architecture—it’s another business park building that is, somehow, literally yards from a medieval walled town. Similarly un-shed-like is the 1994 De Vere Grand Harbour Hotel (‘a shit-brown postmodern Brunswick Centre with a big glass pyramid fucked into it’, says Bad British Architecture, marvellously17). I’ve long thought this a risible, ridiculous building, but somehow in the context of blank, deathly sheds it seems to have at least some ambition, some statement of place and clumsy grandeur—and surely better a failed, ridiculous grandiosity than the utterly grim utilitarianism of the other city hotels. Behind the De Vere is a different conception of civic grandiosity, Eric Lyons’s Castle House. Better known for his private housing, Lyons designed here a powerful council tower block, detailed precisely in stone, concrete and wood. On the last of the walks where these photos were taken, it was being reclad with green glass and UPVC, a material which housing expert Sam Webb claimed had proven to be lethal in tower blocks at the Lakanal House fire in Camberwell.18 Regardless, it’s the cheapest and easiest way to dress a tower, whether a former president of the RIBA designed it or not. The assumption seems to be that its original fabric is automatically worthless, irrespective of it being considered ‘the finest tower in the south’ as late as the 1980s.19
WestQuay hinterland
But this is all really just leading up to Building Design Partnership’s enormous WestQuay mega-mall, the main occupant of the former Pirelli site. I’ve often avoided it gingerly, taken routes that circumvent it. I don’t like it, obviously, but the language that is used to attack it is remarkably similar to that which is used to attack some of the architecture I love. It’s out of scale, it’s too monumental, it’s fortress-like, it’s Not In Keeping, it leads to abrupt and shocking contrasts, it’s too clean and too shiny … well, yes. At one point it bridges the street, next to a line of Regency Terraces, and is full of arch contempt for that which precedes it, irrespective of an attempt to ‘respond’ to the terrace’s scale through an industrial, lightly brick-clad wall, with storage ever so slightly legible as its function. The shopping mall has a suppressed dreamlife, from the socialist politics of its ‘inventor’, the Viennese architect Victor Gruen, to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the shopping arcade as the house of the dreaming collective. BDP, the architects of this and many, many other recent British buildings, have their own socialist past. They began as a co-operative founded by George Grenfell Baines, an architect of Lancastrian working-class extraction, to unite architects, engineers, sociologists, in a non-hierarchical Partnership which could sidestep the hoary old myth of the autonomous architect (that they became a normal private company in 1997, of all years, seems apt). The mall derives from an attempt