GYPSY
GROVE
Not
what you would expect. It runs at the back of the houses, and used to
be lined with trees – but trees grow too tall, or else not at all,
or push over a wall, and so they have to be removed and only scrub
grows back. There are, of course, old sepia photographs to
substantiate my fantasies, which grew out of what I really
experienced fifty years ago, when, to my surprise, I found Gypsy
Grove taking me tranquilly and directly from St James Road to Shirley
High Street. There was a bit of rubbish, and some graffiti, but hey,
it was the seventies, and the Shah was still in power and had to be
brought down by people writing things on walls in Southampton.
Sometimes, the writing on the wall was in Persian. Around that time,
I learnt that if you could peel an apple so carefully that the peel
remained whole and formed one single piece it would spell out the
name of your future spouse. I was never quite sure if I was destined
to marry The
Shah of Iran
or Down
With.
What
fascinated me about Gypsy Grove was not the name – though it would
have been good to see a vardo parked somewhere along it, and a
hobbled horse cropping the grass – but the way it sneaked straight
through between all the houses, which had been built from the 1880s
to the 1950s in various estates and developments, each laid out with
curves and crescents and cul-de-sacs, creating a ground-plan that
might have been the envy of a Renaissance expert in fortifications,
like Leonardo da Vinci, whose skill at that kind of thing, designed
to fool besiegers and make direct frontal assaults impossibly
dangerous, made him more attractive to your average Italian prince
than his ability at anatomical drawing or aeronautical invention. In
other words, it was easy to get lost, following what you thought was
a straight line, but wasn’t, because the road had a dead end, and
when you retraced your steps to take the next side road you found
there was a bend in it that had you facing the wrong way.
That
was and is the thing about Southampton: there are paths through it
that take you places you don’t expect to go, alleys you never
anticipated that lead straight from the dead end of one street to the
dead end of another one. They conduct you past garden fences, over a
stream whose existence you wouldn’t guess, except for the faintest
whisper of water and a wisp of mist late on a summer night, because
the air above the stream is cooler, and then
they let
you out somewhere quite different. Southampton has been dropped on to
a pattern from the past, covering it but not effacing it.
Some
of it may come from the days when it was all prime farmland – which
it must have been, and still is, to judge from the tenacity with
which plants of all kinds force their way up through the asphalt and
out of the cracks between the paving slabs. Some of it may be relics
of the parks associated with the big houses and grounds that spread
north inland from the town and port, to accommodate successful
merchants and associated trades – gone now, leaving their names on
the streets and roads that lead away from The Avenue into the
developments of the late nineteenth century, which commemorate the
heroes and heroism of their times, Alma Road, Gordon Avenue,
Kitchener, Khartoum, Omdurman, Livingstone…
But
what determines the shape of Southampton are its rivers. To begin
with, there are the two which define the central triangle of
settlement: Itchen to the east, Test to the West.
Itchen,
if you like, is the local one, because it rises near Cheriton, flows
north to Alresford to fill a lake covered with waterfowl, then turns
left and fills watercress beds before making its leisurely way past
Avington House where Charles II took all kinds of pleasure, then
through a fine but decayed system of water-meadows to Winchester,
where it turns south and turns a mill, and keeps the roots of the
cathedral moist, and waves reeds and bulrushes at the back of the
College and sustains an obliging path that lets you walk all the way
to Southampton, as if you were a mediaeval pilgrim, who might even
have claimed the Wayfarers Dole at St Cross, on the last leg of your
journey home from a visit to the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury,
to take ship for foreign parts.
Test
seems to come from further away, and to be more purposeful than
Itchen, striving ever southward, set on reaching the sea. It is a
solitary stream, flowing largely through the grounds of the rich,
rarely past homely back gardens, debouching finally into reed beds
that are hospitable only to waterfowl and marsh-dwellers. A road
roars across it, looking down on the many-arched old bridge, the
diving-board for tombstoners. Once south of that, it ceases to be a
river and turns into an arm of the sea, its shore available for
exploitation.
Once,
if you left Southampton Central on the Down side, you found yourself
on the beach; now, you have to cross a busy, more or less four-lane
road to reach the ragbag of architecturally offensive consumer units
on reclaimed land, some of which was reclaimed from the sea, and some
from the Pirelli factory. None of the socially interesting
suggestions for the use of that suddenly available space so near the
centre of the town ever came to anything.
But
from the road that runs along it, where once the waves washed and the
mud stank, you can see The Walls, which rise impressively high above
you. With the lack of forethought which characterises so much of
government policy, to the present day and beyond, they were only
built after
the French raid of 1338, which sent much of the town up in flames.
Before that, the major danger was perceived as coming from the rest
of England, rather than overseas. Norman merchants’ houses, which
probably doubled as warehouses and stood immediately on the quay, had
doors and windows blocked with stones and were thus incorporated more
or less overnight into the fortifications. Through West Gate, Henry V
and his men marched on to West Quay to embark for France in a
temporarily successful attempt to make good his claim to the throne
of at least part of that disparate region, many areas of which
continued to belong to England, in various ways, for a good few years
more.
What
interests me is the sudden disparity in height. Southampton is on a
long peninsula between the two rivers, poking its sharp tongue out at
the sea, which calls itself Southampton Water, and that peninsula
slopes down quite gradually towards its slightly vulgar end. But
every now and then, there are sharp and unexpected drops. One, for
example, is the swoop of Bevois Valley, named after Bevis of Hamton,
who slew the giant Ascupart in some romance or other. This particular
big dipper is a thrill for cyclists going towards town, and a torment
to them coming back, and probably derives from a stream coming off
the main north-south ridge of the peninsula, which is The Avenue, or
possibly from a landslip of some kind. Hard to tell, when so much of
what might be the flood-plain is covered with buildings.
Covering
interesting areas with nondescript buildings is a habit of
Southampton, in which it was aided by the Luftwaffe, who enabled the
redevelopment of a large area of the oldest part of the town, south
of the West Gate, as a buddleia-speckled lorry-park, including a
couple of Norman churches that were sentimentally preserved as
roofless ruins, looking like decommissioned bus-shelters. The
demolition of a considerable number of Victorian terraces, filled
with small and interesting junk-shops, which lay over the duly
excavated Saxon settlement of Hamwih, largest port and trading
entrepôt
in Europe in the 7th
century, culminated, not in the creation of a Visitor Centre on the
model of the Yorvik Experience, but in a forest of traffic-lights and
an asphalt-covered road-interchange that was in the running for Most
Confusing Junction In Europe.
I
have tried not to stray across either Dark Water, and wish to remain
on The Land Between the Two Rivers, but I have to mention the Itchen
Bridge, because it illustrates the same strange discrepancy of levels
that haunts me in this city. Once upon a time, the road from the east
came down a slope to cross the Itchen, and arrived at a Floating
Bridge, which one might call a Chain Ferry. It was pulled to and fro
by chains on drums, and left the channel free for boats of all sizes
to go upriver or down-river, as they wished. L.S. Lowry portrayed it,
in his inimitable fashion, when he came to visit a lady-friend in the
city, and his version hangs in Southampton City Art Gallery. But it
constituted a bottle-neck, and so a bridge was built, high above the
water, taking traffic to what was once a lively part of town, by the
old dock-gates, where, if you look, you can find Terminus Station,
from the days when the next stage after the railway was the sea, and,
if you look even harder, The Old Bowling Green, that claims to be
from the thirteenth century, even before Geoffrey Chaucer’s father
was here. Of course, to reach ground level after the bridge, or to
reach the bridge from the earth, traffic has to whizz round a
tight-curved helter-skelter on full lock in low gear with foot down.
And the bridge attracts its share of tragedies in the making.
When
I lived in Southampton, I taught at the University, and had most to
do with that part of the town – but even though I walked from home
to work, I still found unexpected surprises of a physical kind,
which, on reflection, seemed to me, if not metaphysical, then
metaphorical. It wasn’t just the Big Dipper of Church Lane, or the
unexpected cut-through from Highfield Crescent, or the vast rough
open space between the back of Broadlands Road and the back of Granby
Grove and Sirdar Road – it was, in one particular instance, the
precipitous garden of the house that belonged to the Professor of
French. Madrigals in the garden, one summer evening – and a flight
of steps, down from the patio, where the singing went on, into the
darkness, at an angle that would not have been out of place on a
Cornish cliff-face! Was it just the result of deep
dissection by drainage
as the geography textbooks would have it? Or, as I know for sure
about the drop at the south-western corner of the main university
campus, and suspect about other unexpected declines, was it a
clay-pit? They dug out the earth for the footings, and piled it up,
and turned it into bricks, and fired them in kilns on the site, and
built the walls for the foundations, and followed the seam of
brick-earth to build the rest of the houses… And that meant digging
away a great deal, and that left a hole, which will, eventually, be
filled up, with all kinds of stuff…
Let
me finish this exploration of my past, and Southampton’s past, with
my own understanding of what it’s all about. Unexpected links
between one place and another. Patterns that persist. Building things
out of what’s underneath you – and the way that that process
leaves traces, which themselves absorb other random materials, and
bring them, too, together, which may, I hope, make yet more
connections…
Frome
17-21.vi.2020
Consult
googlemaps satellite view for the features I mention...
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