Glory Days
There are many clues in Southampton to its Regency glory and medieval magnificence, but they have the severe ill-fortune of being located in modern Southampton. The city is a mix of the old, which is generally magnificent, and the new, which has spoiled it completely.
The docks here and the proximity of the Supermarine factory building Spitfires made Southampton a prime target for Nazi bombers during the Second World War. The air raids of late November and early December 1940 were known as the Southampton Blitz. The firestorm could be seen from the coast of France eighty-five miles away across the English Channel. By the end of the war it is estimated that two thousand three hundred bombs had been dropped on the city by German bombers as well as over thirty thousand incendiary devices. In total, Southampton had forty-five thousand buildings damaged or demolished during the war. Walking around the rebuilt city, I couldn’t help wondering whether, if we asked very nicely, they might come back and do the same again.
Almost all of that which survived the bombings is beautiful and almost everything built afterwards is either truly ghastly or just plain dull. It’s like a beautiful woman who has chosen to have half her face tattooed with pictures of spiders and slugs. Admittedly, you can stand on Terminus Terrace and wonder if, perhaps, you’ve been a bit harsh in your views on the city. The red brick upper stories of the Royal Mail House with stone window-surrounds sit above the ground floor made to look as though it is made from blocks of Portland stone; this building is quite pleasant and sits across a wide thoroughfare from the elaborately tiled exterior of the London Hotel. Behind you, South Western House with all of its Victorian splendour and little, ironwork balconies is just fantastic. Yet just fifty yards away in any direction you’ll find pale brick and dark blue framed windows in blocks of flats or offices which are just horrid.
Southampton was where J.B. Priestley began his 1933 English Journey, travelling on a new motor-coach down the Great West Road from London. He saw Southampton at the very end of its glory days, when this was a place where journeys really began and ended. For globetrotters before the jet age, there was little option but to travel in the great ships leaving ports like Southampton for Cape Town or New York or just about anywhere in the world. Today people fly from Heathrow and even though the massive cruise liners still dock at Southampton, they don’t appear to do much for the town. People just pass through in a hurry and don’t stop to shop.
In the very middle of the main shopping street in Southampton, you will find the marvellous Bargate: a twelfth century gatehouse which formed part of the walls of the old city. In the fifteenth century it was a prison; in the sixteenth, the city’s courthouse and, later, the guildhall. It is a magnificent building and, quite rightly, Grade One listed and a scheduled monument. It is surrounded, though, by the very worst of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. It’s Burger King and Poundland and Lidl and sixties brick and concrete and cladding and the dullest shopping streets in Western Europe. J.B. Priestley, once he’d spent some time in Southampton, recognised that the people spending their money on the bustling high street were spending it mostly on cheap things in “threepenny and sixpenny stores” and “blatant cut price shops”; that much has not changed. Nor has what he found when venturing away from the high street where he found himself in “poor quarters” with “slovenly and dirty” shops.
There is some respite from this in the five huge and generally pleasant parks that run in a line and abut each other through the middle of Southampton. They do, however, also offer a pleasant place for the city’s street drinkers and I saw more street drinkers in a deeper state of inebriation in Southampton than I remember seeing anywhere in Britain, ever.
One man sat on a park bench with an impressive stock of canned beer and his life, or at the very least, his Tuesday afternoon, seemed to consist entirely of drinking the contents of a can, toddling unsteadily to the litter bin fifty yards away and then returning to his bench to repeat the process.
I saw three drunks, two males and one female, outside Waitrose of all places, who were helping each other to make progress along the street. The older male had a beard and one eye closed, a la Popeye. I couldn’t tell whether this was a permanent, Odin-like, feature or merely an attempt to focus. He carried and occasionally leant on an NHS aluminium crutch but preferred to use, for support, his two companions who were either side of him. They only seemed to be able to support him and each other due to the lucky coincidence that they happened to be falling in opposite directions. However, I can’t be certain that I wouldn’t end up in the same state if I lived in Southampton.
Having very much given the impression that I wouldn’t want to live here, I, rather paradoxically, didn’t mind staying here. I like being a paradox.
Two of the best hotels I ever stayed in were near to Southampton. The first was the Hilton at the Ageas Bowl. The Ageas Bowl has that name as though anyone at all knows who or what Ageas is or how to pronounce it. The bowl is the Rose Bowl, the £20 million home of Hampshire Cricket Club, opened in 2001. Ageas has something to do with sponsorship but, as I don’t know who Ageas is or what they may do, it’s clearly not doing them much good. Part of this huge circular stadium, which hosts all sorts of events as well as cricket games, is taken up by the Hilton hotel. I stay in lots of hotels and, generally, I book based on price and not a lot else, so it was very pleasant to be given a room here which had a balcony overlooking the huge cricket ground. There wasn’t a match on, so I sat on the balcony and watched the grass grow which, for me, was about as exciting.
The second hotel that I stayed in nearby was the Best Western Chilworth Manor Hotel. I like staying at Best Western hotels because they are all different and often a bit like staying at your Nan’s house. I arrived here quite late one evening and very tired after a long day. I pleaded for mercy.
“I’ve been up since five-thirty, I had to go to Luton, I’m tired, I’m thirsty, I’m hungry, I’m alone and it’s my birthday.” I told the receptionist.
“Let’s see what we can do to make up for that,” she said.
What she did was to give me the Dorothy L. Sayers Suite. This is not the kind of room I am normally lucky enough to be given. As well as the bed and chairs there was room for a two-seat sofa in the apse-like, semi-circular bay window where I could sit and watch the huge TV and eat the fudge that had been snuck into my suitcase as a birthday treat by my wife.
The hotel website, while it does tell you that the hotel is handy for Peppa Pig World, does not relate how the house may be connected to the life of Dorothy L. Sayers. However, in the room, is a framed page or two from one of her books and a type-written note that explains that she was related to former owners of the house. So, it had nothing much to do with her, really. It would have made a perfect location for one of her country-house detective murder mysteries, though. Lord Peter Wimsey would have felt right at home here, looking out of the windows over the twenty-seven acres of gardens and eating his birthday fudge.
Nobody really seems to know when a house was built here but a map of 1755 does indicate that there might have been a building around about where the hotel sits today. There are references to a house here in 1801 and by the middle of the nineteenth century, Chilworth House was owned by John Browne Willis Fleming, but he didn’t live there initially, he let it out to tenants. By 1870, he had moved in with his wife Ida.
John died two years later but his wife re-married and continued to live at Chilworth. In 1893 John and Ida’s son, John Edward Arthur Willis Fleming, married and took up residence. John and, later, his son, substantially rebuilt and enlarged the house and changed the name to Chilworth Manor.
During the Second World War, the house was requisitioned and used by the army. In the 1960s it became a halls of residence for Southampton University and then a hotel in the 1970s, which was when my room was last decorated. I liked it, though, it was a bit like staying at my Nan’s house if my Nan had been the Dowager Countess Bleese, which she wasn’t.
I’m not overly fussy about hotel rooms, I don’t really care when it was last decorated as long as most of the wallpaper is still on the walls and it is reasonably clean. I like a coat hook on the back of the door and, in the bathroom, a mirror for shaving, preferably heated, and not one that shows me having a poo. Too many hotel bathrooms have mirrors in which you can watch yourself having a poo. That is just one of the list of things that you never need to see: your own insides on the outside; anything with Michael Macintyre in it; your parents making the beast with two backs; and yourself having a poo. It should be made clear to hoteliers and hotel designers that some people need a mirror in which to shave, others need one in which to put on make-up. Some, no doubt, given the multiplicity and variety of humanity, require a mirror for both. There are many, I am led to believe, who need a mirror to style their hair, though this is only a distant memory for me. Nobody though, no-one at all, needs a mirror in order to watch themselves having a poo. There, I’ve said it.
So, you see, my needs are fairly simple, it’s really nice when you get something that little bit special, though. It must be pretty terrible if you only ever stay in the very finest hotels with your every whim catered for, you’d start to worry about the most pointless of things. There is a reason that it’s called being spoiled, it must spoil everything for you if you’re worried about whether your morning newspaper has been thoroughly ironed or concerned about the temperature of your 1992 Domaine Leflaive Montrachet Grand Cru.
All I really worry about is, is my room warm? Is it dry? Is the bed comfortable? Do the towels feel like you’re drying yourself with 30-grit sandpaper? Are you likely to catch anything nasty while staying there? Can you poo without seeing yourself reflected dozens of times in oddly-angled mirrors? Is the shower curtain attracted to you like iron filings are to a magnet? Is there a coat hook? Can I open a window so it’s not like spending the night in Tupperware? Does a veggie burger cost less than fourteen quid? That’s me just about sorted and I’m aware that I’m massively privileged to be asking even those, limited questions.
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