BY NIALL MCCRAE
The first port of call, on JB Priestley’s tour of England in 1933, was Southampton. That phrase is appropriate, because the city is best known as Britain’s gateway to the ocean. Cruise-ships proliferate nowadays, but Southampton retains the regular trans-Atlantic service to New York (crossing on Cunard’s Queen Mary 2). Narrowing of the English Channel between the neck of Cherbourg and Portland Bill causes higher tides, enabling Southampton’s harbour to take the largest vessels.
Priestley had only previously been to Southampton to board or disembark as a passenger (to France as an officer in the Great War, and on an excursion to Canada). Now he was purposively visiting the city itself, for his social enquiry. He travelled from London by motor-coach, arriving on the London Road via Winchester: –
You are still staring at the pleasant Hampshire countryside when you notice that it is beginning to put itself into some order, and then the next minute you find that it is Southampton Common and that the townsfolk can be seen walking there, and the minute after, the road is cutting between West Park and East Park, and on either side the smaller children of absent pursers and chief stewards are running from sunlight to shadow, and there are pretty frocks glimmering among the trees; and now, in another minute, the town itself is all around you, offering you hats and hams and acrobats at the Palace Theatre.
Despite the nationwide economic gloom of the Thirties, the town centre appeared relatively prosperous, at Priestley’s first glance: –
The pavement on each side was crowded with neat smiling people, , mostly women, and the mile of shops seemed to be doing a brisk trade. At first I felt like a man who had walked into a fairy-tale of commerce.
At the end of the shopping parade Priestley arrived at the familiar Town Quay:-
Here the present was dominating the past, just as these giant liners themselves were dominating not only the sheds and wharves that tried to enclose them but the very town itself. Their black-and-crimson and buff funnels were enormous, dazzling. They seemed to me things not only of formidable size and power but also of real beauty, genuine creations of man the artist.
Returning to the town, Priestley was less impressed: –
Once off that long High Street, I found myself in some very poor quarters. The only thing to be said in favour of these squalid little side-streets of Southampton is that they did not seem as devastatingly dismal as the slums of the big industrial towns. There was still a sea sparkle in these people’s lives. The air in the narrow brick gullies, thickened as it was by the reek of overcrowded rooms, bad food, piles of old junk, had not entirely lost its salt and savour. Cheap food and drink and tobacco and gossip were to be had; the men could guffaw round the entrance to the old junk yards; the girls knew how to powder their noses; the children could wander to the water’s edge.
Priestley, unaware of how blandly conformist the high street would become with the corporate takeover, railed against the small shop; he saw no sentimental value in local family retailers.
It is hard to look at these small shops with anything but disgust, or to find good reasons why they should not be promptly abolished. They are slovenly, dirty and inefficient. They only spoil the goods they offer for sale, especially if those goods, as they usually are, happen to be foodstuffs. One large clean shed, a decent warehouse, would be better than these pitiful establishments with their fly-blown windows and dark reeking interiors and blowsy proprietors.
Revising his perspective on the bustling High Street, Priestley observed: –
The money that was being freely spent was going mostly on cheap things, and there seemed no end of threepenny and sixpenny stores and the brittle spoils of Czecho-Slovakia and Japan. I noticed too quite a number of blatant cut-price shops, their windows crammed with goods, mostly inferior and dubious, and loud with placards so exclamatory that they made one’s eyes jump. From one to the other, cut-price to sixpenny store, went the wives of distant third-engineers and stewards, spending their grass-widowhood in cheap shopping before going to the pictures.
Yet overall, Priestley left Southampton with a good impression. The ravages of recession were visible but not overwhelmingly so.
Not a bad town, this. Contriving to enjoy its unique situation, between forest and heath and deep blue water, a lovely bay window upon the wide world.
He concluded: –
Nevertheless, Southampton has not been able, just as their very owners have not been able, to live up to those great ships it harbours. Their coming and going light it up. The citizens are knowledgeable about and proud of these visiting giants, but they have not succeeded yet in building a town or planning a life worthy of such majestic company. What a Southampton that would be!
Southampton today is as busy as ever. The football club plays at St Mary’s Stadium on the dockside, where the fans sing the club’s adopted anthem ‘When the Saints Go Marching in’. Like other clubs, the vast majority of Southampton supporters are white Britons, and this is not representative of the present populace.
Priestley mentioned a few ‘brown faces’ in Southampton, which was not unusual in port towns, but on my recent visit almost half of the people I passed on the pavement were of African, Oriental, South Asian or Middle-Eastern ethnicities, and among schoolchildren hardly any were of Hampshire stock. Back at the turn of the millennium Southampton remained well over ninety per-cent white British, but today every large town or city in England is assumed to be multicultural, as we are reminded on notices and advertisements that suggest extinction of the white man.
What would Priestley have thought of Southampton today? Perhaps he would have been impressed by the spacious, brightly lit shopping malls. In 1991 the Marlands was built on the site of the central bus station, but this was dwarfed by the West Quay mall, opened in 2000 on the dockside. Priestley was writing before the ascent of chain stores, many of which are now struggling or closing, leaving gaps on the traditional high street.
New forms of independent commerce have emerged: vape shops, Turkish barbers, nail bars, dog-grooming salons, and takeaway food outlets. There is not much to buy that is tangible or useful: you need to visit an out-of-town retail site, or order online. The days of the town centre providing for every need are long gone. The shopping malls are dominated by female fashion, and bookshops are like hen’s teeth.
Like other cities Southampton is waging war on the private car. Ever-rising apartment blocks have no parking provision, and it is expected that residents will spend most of their time in the vicinity of their urban pad. Southampton is preparing itself for the future of the low-consumption, minimal-travel Smart City, where all basic sustenance will be within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride. Southampton Common will be the playground, and perhaps as far as the denizens of city-centre flats are allowed to go.
On his way through Wiltshire after leaving Southampton, Priestley saw from the coach window an artillery brigade on the march.
How innocent the field guns looked, all polished and muzzled and in their best clothes? As we passed gun after gun, and dozens of foolish red young faces, I was asking myself when these things would next fire at an enemy and for what fantastic cause.
Critical theorists believe that the First World War was an act of eugenics, at a time when the intelligentsia and ruling class feared being overwhelmed by the working-class masses, whose numbers had multiplied in the industrial revolution. As technology replaces human labour, and artificial intelligence puts professional practitioners out of work, employment prospects are bleak. A basic universal income is likely to be introduced by the government, but this will be paying people for no productive output (useless eaters’, as Yuval Noah Hariri described them).
But is there not always the solution of war? As they flock to the football at St Mary’s, no doubt the white British youth will answer the call of King and Country should it ever come. Not voluntarily or with jingoistic fervour, but by order and meek compliance. Conscription is coming, and as in the 1930s, Southampton will thrive on military industry and logistics. Factories that built Ford Transit vans and compact disc lasers in the near past will be repurposed perhaps for armoured vehicles, missiles and drones.
The almost hundred years from Priestley’s visit to the Southampton of today is a stark contrast, but the future may be unrecognisable but for the shape of the harbour.
Niall McCrae is an officer of the independent Workers of England Union