In Search of the South Coast Supercity

Cities and the myths they tell about themselves. Read: this old article on the Southampton-Portsmouth rivalry, which says a surprising amount about politics and culture in the unglamorous bits of Southern England. Now, as a Sotonian with family from Portsmouth and Fareham, I don't quite have the requisite visceral hatred for Pompey that is customary (although I should point out here I don't go as far as my Grandma, who always claimed to 'support both', which defies the laws of nature). Either way, what is really interesting in this article is that it makes perfectly clear that the alleged historical and political reasons for the intense mutual hatred are something imposed post-facto. For instance, Portsmouth supporters have always claimed that their chosen insult for us - 'scum' (imaginative!) comes from 'Southampton Corporation Union Men', in reference to a Dock strike broken by Southampton Dockers in the '30s. As Southampton is a commercial port and Portsmouth a military one, this is of course impossible - though as the article points out, the latter did acquire a commercial port in the '80s partly by accepting scab shipping when Southampton was on strike. Yet the defence of Southampton's own radical history here is also based on political falsehood (at least in this instance - in the 1910s the docks stood with Red Clydeside as one of the most Bolshevik places in the country), through the non-fact that Southampton was the only city south of London to elect a Labour MP in the 1983 election. In fact, SDP defections meant that Soton had only Tory MPs between 1983 and 1992.

The significance of all this local minutiae? That both of these cities, in relatively apolitical parts of the country, justify their sporting hatreds largely through reference to history (mutual enmity between military and civilian England) and left-wing politics (through imaginary breaches of working class solidarity). In particular, the article shows the two cities competing as to who is the roughest via evident untruths. So Soton is apparently posh and semi-rural because Winchester and the New Forest are nearby - a quick trip to St Marys or (shudder) Thornhill should rectify this misapprehension. Portsmouth is alleged to be an insular island, yet Pompey has played the Blairite iconic architecture/urban regeneration game far more effectively than the hapless Soton, which has almost solely built nondescript retail and Barratt boxes since the 70s. British cities' perception of each other, when refracted through the compulsory agonism of sport, gets decidedly skewed, but is on close investigation usually built on absolutely sod all, and tends to be very recent. Interestingly, in the 60s, at the exact point the Soton-Pompey rivalry first emerged, Colin Buchanan was charged by the Wilson government with developing a plan for the 'Southampton-Portsmouth Supercity'. Uniting these two cities separated by a vague suburban interzone into one huge metropolis of around a million people, this would have become the fourth or fifth city in the country. The plan resembles Nikolai Milyutin's Sotsgorod, the production line city never quite built in the USSR - a diagram made up of linear strips of industry and suburbia linking the two distinct cities, with a dense new centre in the middle. It could be argued that the Saints/Pompey rivalry is what happened instead of this South Coast Megalopolis. Rather than a real modernity, we got dimwitted atavism - but one justified with recourse to the serious politics it effectively replaced.