Down and Out in Eastleigh

Recently I went to Eastleigh, a railway town just on the edge of Southampton which just happens to be the place where I spent half of my childhood. Here, me and my Dad (and hundreds of 6th form students) were watching a production of 1984 at the local theatre. I had excitedly asked to review it for Icon, which I did. It was bad, very bad, and an interesting contrast with, say, BADco, as it all seemed incredibly English by comparison with their reinvigoration of Constructivist theatre. Here, a giggly parody of Constructivism was combined with a refusal to take Orwell or Nineteen Eighty-Four seriously, all incredibly redolent of a particular post-1989 idiocy, in its insistence that socialism and socialist aesthetics lead inevitably to a (nonetheless slightly sexeh) totalitarian nightmare. Regardless. What was interesting, in the sense of 'not necessarily interesting but deeply symptomatic', was returning to Eastleigh after not having walked round it for around 15 years, to find a place as achingly, depressingly English as could possibly be imagined, in a way which felt to me like a commentary on Orwell - or rather, the live bits of Orwell, on language*, surveillance and manufactured scarcity - more than the production itself.

Eastleigh is a small company town, planned as a complete entity in the late 19th century for the South-Western Railway. It was settled by workers transferred from the works at Nine Elms, meaning that it was for a while a south London enclave in Hampshire, and I swear the accent, at least, survived until the 1990s. On moving aged 12 to a council estate in within the city boundaries, not only did I find the semis and front gardens suspiciously posh-looking, but I also thought the estate kids' semi-rural accent to be surprising and hilarious, which guaranteed me some perhaps slightly deserved kickings. I suspect that by the 50s Eastleigh had forgotten it was once a colony of London, and the gridiron plan gradually extended outwards from the '30s onwards, so that it's now more an indeterminate zone between Southampton and Winchester than a town in itself, so while it is incongruously dense at the centre, it's mostly dispersed, exurban, straggling, the bleak reality of the libertarian promises of 'Non-Plan', which once proposed to turn the area into a discontinuous funfest. Walking distance from the centre is Southampton Airport, which is on the site of an interwar camp for Jewish refugees, midway from Eastern Europe to New York City, although this bit of history is seldom mentioned, lest it imply that Southampton was once not provincial. Eastleigh had its brief moment in the national news in the mid-90s when its Tory MP, Stephen Milligan, was found dead with orange in mouth, plastic bag on head and suspenders on legs. I recall BBC News visiting the town, an incredible, improbable breaking of telly into life. I also remember when the 'historic' grid was broken into in the '80s, by a shopping mall, the Swan Centre, where I spent most of my early adolescence browsing through books at WH Smith. The town library was inside the Mall, reached by a glass lift, but I spent a lot less time in there, it didn't have the gloss of commerce to it.

The train to Southampton that I've taken hundreds of times in the last 10 years goes through Eastleigh in its last stretch, and hence through an enormous cargoscape of rusting vintage carriages, freight-trains carrying Chinese containers, with Southampton's Ford Transit factory visible in the distance. So I remember seeing the bombed-out church, a place which to me always seemed incomparably ancient (I was so disappointed when I realised it was Victorian) restored in the '90s/00s into a block of flats, improbably. It won an Evening Standard award for housing, and whether it was deconsecrated or not, the move from God to property seems highly symbolic. All of this is still there, but the inner streets - Cranbury Road, where I lived, Desborough, Chamberlayne, Derby Road, Factory Road - have a drinking ban in place, to stop general ultraviolence and roisterousness from occurring in the residential area. It's not hard to see why this might occur, as the place looks utterly fucked, not to put to fine a point on it. Everyone looks ill, half the shops are charity shops (not wholly a bad thing, though not a sign of great economic health), and the first conversation I hear when sitting down with my drink in the Wagon Works is 'Soon it'll be an Islamic Republic...Enoch was right...still, there'll never be rivers of blood 'cos the English don't have the guts'. I remembered that when I grew up here most of my friends were second/third generation Asian, and I wondered, looking round town at all the white faces, whether they all escaped to the other side of the M27, or hopefully further than that.

It's a bizarre leap to blame immigration for Eastleigh's desuetude. I once came across someone describing Eastleigh as a Northern town lost in Hampshire, which is true in part (though certainly not at the super-affluent outskirts) - it's a very thorough bit of planning, and its buildings are a residue of, first, Victorian civic culture - the town hall, the two-up/two-downs, the churches, the redbrick Gothic school - and later, something else, something perhaps promising transformation - the garden city estates outside the grid, the 'Labour Party House', The Comrades Club, which I'm amazed and pleased to see is still called The Comrades Club, though I suspect it's a karaoke and real ale fest rather than a hotbed of agitational theatre. The town was once a Labour stronghold, but boundary changes and drift meant that by the 70s it was a Tory seat - my Dad tells me that the town once had one of the highest Labour memberships in the south of England, but only because anyone who was on the 'tote', buying a raffle ticket, at the Labour club, became an automatic 'member'. It's hard to imagine any active politics there now, corrupt or otherwise, as it's gone the way of most places of once-skilled labour - confused, lost, lumpen.

The place is planned for industry, very precisely. Railway Works at one end, Pirelli Cables factory at the other, with a grid of terraces inbetween and semis at the sides - more channelled, less 'adaptable' than any modernist plan, although like all Victorian urbanism it's seen as some sort of force of nature, the way things have always been, rather than something directed and planned for pecuniary purposes. As it is, all the industries I remember being here even in the early '90s are now gone - the Mr Kipling factory from whence we got slabs of chocolate and the revelation that Tesco's cakes were exactly the same as the Kipling's cakes, the huge railway works, once one of the biggest in the country (as presumably there's no demand for new trains...) and most shockingly, as I remember it always just in the near distance, the Pirelli factory at the end of Factory Road is gone, replaced by new Heritage Flats, with street names taken from the handful of famous residents - Joe Meek's bleach-blond boy, Heinz Burt from The Tornados; plus, of course, Benny Hill Close (in a similarly rum vein, the Daily Mirror's striptease strip Jane was based on a woman of Eastleigh, though I don't know if she has a close named after her...). Apparently, there are proposals to rename Factory Road, because it gives the wrong impression of the place. At the centre of Eastleigh is what can only be described as a Socialist Realist sculpture, depicting a railwayman, erected around the time the railway works was being closed down.

The urban environment Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is not, contra the misunderstandings of generations of conservative dystopians, one in which modern technology and design have created something blandly and oppressively hygienic. It's a mess, made up of crumbling detritus left over from the 19th century, all cabbage-smelling tenements, overcrowding, damp, bombsites and 'adaptive reuse'. Similarly, the art or music mentioned there is not agitprop, not strident Brechtian attempts to jolt the audience into action, but lurid, expensive snuff footage of war, where you can see the enemy die in a variety of interesting ways. The proles, whose presence in any given Orwell book tends to become decidedly creepy, are misshapen and quiescent. If anything works, it's the buildings of the Inner Party - the Ministries, and O'Brien's gleaming apartment with its multiple elevators. But most of Airstrip One is squalid and Victorian. After leaving the theatre, the two places - the sniggering satire on the prospect of a non-Victorian world, and the grim reality of a dead Victorian town - seemed linked, with the former being one of the ideological legitimations of the other. Neoliberalism, the dominance of heritage, nationalism and small-mindedness, the violent transformation into a service economy, all seemed to make us more rather than less Victorian at the start of the 21st century.

* on which subject - go listen to I.T on Radio 4, on the deficiencies of Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. Thanks to PD Smith, Rouge's Foam and Matt Poacher for encouraging Eastleigh tweeting.