An Affirmation of The Freemantle Passageway

First of two or three photo-essays where I fill in the gaps from previous Southampton posts with the aid of a camera with a zoom lens. The place to start is of course the Port, as this is the reason why the city was founded (not for shopping, despite appearances to the contrary). However, as previously mentioned, the port is not an easy thing to see. This in itself should not surprise overmuch, as, for all the drastic changes in ports over the last few decades, docks were always heavily guarded places. The London Docks used to have a gigantic wall to keep out those not on business, something which now exists in a less tangible form in the financial district of Docklands. In Southampton this is yet more subtle, in that, although the docks seem to have little effect on the town, they still exist, and are (or rather were until the crash) thriving. I went to the city's main comprehensive school, and nobody I knew had parents who worked on the docks. More often, work derived from the service industry in the centre, or at a remove or none from the Russell Group university in the suburban north. Yet, beginning at the centre of town, and straggling its way along the inner-city district of Freemantle, past the Modernist suburbia of Millbrook and ending at the edge of the New Forest, is the major cruise port, and the second largest container port, in Britain. Its success, size and centrality are matched only by its invisibility.

There are few places to catch any semblance of it, let alone at its full scale, unless you're lucky enough to have a tower block flat in Millbrook, Shirley or Redbridge. You could look from the other side of Southampton Water (I've never done so – there be dragons), or, more interestingly, there is a bridge and a pathway which begins at Millbrook Railway Station. This is itself a strange remnant, one of those stations which have around a train an hour which miraculously survived the Beeching Axe (as harsh here as everywhere else, claiming even the central terminus). Were you walking from my Mum's house in Freemantle, you could see it start to rise above the terraces and flats, the enormous arcing cranes softened by the winter light. The cruel scale and drama of the cranes makes everything around seem petty.

Salt and Battery Fish & Chips, as featured in a previous instalment, is now a casualty of the credit crunch. From behind it one of the creatures looks on unforgivingly. Round the corner, the limousine, parked in the garden of an unprepossessing house, is the first evidence of the cruise ships, as it is almost certainly owned (or rented) by the driver, not the passengers, a sign of the otherwise imperceptible luxury nearby. At the centre of this place is the British American Tobacco Factory, itself departing from Southampton, with the loss of 600 jobs - you can see it behind the houses in the photograph below.

A fine vantage point is provided by a terrace of respectable looking Victorian houses. These would once have looked out onto a picturesque estuary, but the massive land reclamation projects of the 1920s meant that they look out instead on the container port. As you can see, this may have had an effect on the land values.

The disassociation of industry and architecture after Modernism is spectacularly visible along the container port. Most of the architecture built after the container port was built in 1969 is in this vernacular vein.

The building above is nowhere near the worst example, its tight clustered roofs suggesting minor design ambitions, but looking out onto the industrial cyber-architecture of the port it seems utterly absurd, architecture placing its hands over its ears and eyes. Nothing – nothing – has even attempted to exploit the drama of this place, which is again unsurprising, as container ports are not supposed to be seen. Mostly they occur in places like Felixstowe or Tilbury, rather than near the centre of medieval cities. So, then. You climb up a frighteningly unstable-seeming motorway bridge, which leads to Millbrook station, and from here, equipped with zoom lens and/or binoculars, the port reveals itself at nearly its full extent. The neglect of the place is clear enough from the foliage that has draped itself around the concrete and steel of the station bridges, a mutant nature which is particularly virulent round here.

Walter Benjamin differentiated Constructivist, Communist aesthetics from Fascist, Futurist aestheticism by pointing out how the latter were merely interested in the look of technology, and had little interest in finding out how it worked, in mastering and applying it – it was instead a subject for a kind of technological nature painting. I don't know how this port complex works, though I find it almost traumatically beautiful. Although my purpose here is to examine what happens to a place when something like this is in it's midst, it is important to work out how it works, to explain the networks of trade and power that keep it going. Here I can offer some minimal information but not much else.

Southampton Container Port is officially known as 'DP World Southampton'. It is 51% owned by DP World, which is itself owned by Dubai World, the insolvent state-run conglomerate. The other 49% is owned by Associated British Ports, denationalised in the early '80s and now largely owned by Goldman Sachs. That these institutions would have little interest in Southampton itself is again deeply unsurprising. Dubai World rationalised the port still further throughout the 2000s, introducing more automation and decimating the already tiny workforce.

Rather than being introduced at a confrontational Thatcherite stroke, containerisation and the destruction of Southampton dock labour was gradual, until after a few decades robots practically outnumbered dockers. How to respond to these cranes, then, these complex, almost autonomous creatures, operated (or not) by something fleshy in their interior? How could we have possibly fought them? They promise a true liberation from work, one of the most visible pieces of evidence for the genuine possibility of an automated labour replacing us and letting us fish in the afternoon/philosophise in the evening/and so forth. Yet we never benefitted from it, instead servile service industry work replicated, needlessly, pointlessly, the old structure of 40 hours (plus) a week and a paycheque, this time with less rights, less bargaining power. How could we have used the robots?

We might at least have done something more interesting with them than this. The port transports cars, it transports consumer goods manufactured in the Special Economic Zones of the People's Republic of China, and as you can see here it transports waste and scrap, the literal version of an overwhelming sense of waste, both political and actual.

The port is the main importer of cars in the UK. These views of it half-empty may be a portent of the obsolescence of that particular form of locomotion, which does look rather antiquated when seen as a component part of this triumph of blank, rectilinear automation – the freight trains seem to slot into it far more neatly. But I'm cheating here by taking photographs a couple of days after Christmas, in what is no doubt a fallow period even by the standards of the deepest recession in British history. Assembled together according to type they look surreal – three red cars all in a line, waiting to be transported around the country.

Walking down the steps of Millbrook Station's railway bridge brings you to the passageway, and I have no idea how or why the passageway exists. It's incredibly thin and overgrown, and it continues for around a mile to the Central Station, passing through a landscape which Tarkovsky would have revelled in, although he may have blanched at its most remarkable work of art. This pathway has at one side the motorway which runs alongside the port, on the other the railway line, so is bordered on each side by metal fences – topped on the port side by barbed wire. The view of the cruise ship Oriana, through the barbed wire or otherwise, exemplifies this city rather neatly – hidden, untouchable luxury amidst general meanness. The Oriana was built in Germany by P&O in the mid-1990s, and apparently the original intention was to build it in the UK, but no shipyard capable of such a feat survives. Southampton's Vosper Thornycroft (military) shipyard closed in 2003.

There's something rather comic about the contrast between the sleek Corbusian melodrama of a cruise ship and the self-effacing container ships. In the latter, a vast amount of consumer cargo is contained in a seemingly small, undramatic space – in the former, superfluous luxury is massive and bombastic.

The path is not blocked off, so in principle this is a public right of way, and I've seen other people walking it – but there are pylons in its midst, which you can go up and touch, were you to throw caution to the wind. Like everything else here, greenery takes over as much as it possibly can, creeping up the pylons themselves. Nearby, crows and robins are irritated to have their calm disturbed. Modern Warfare is advertised across the road, and modern warriors depart from Marchwood, over Southampton Water.

Halfway along the path the passageway is traversed by the motorway, in the form of a geometrically peculiar overpass, leaving a triangular-shaped sheltered space.

This space has some kind of lake inside it, a puddle deep enough to make it enormously unpleasant if one is not wearing wellingtons, as the mud and vague, indeterminate pollution coalesce into a viscous, soupy gloop. But here there is evidence that this passageway is enormously prized, at least by some – a series of planks have been laid across it, forming a precarious but usable bridge, as tentative and partial as the concrete bridge above it is solid and certain.

The reason for all of this soon becomes clear – this has become a canvas for Southampton's graffiti artists. Now, I'm not usually a fan of tagging, which usually seems a drab micro-egotism, cliquey territorial pissings never aimed at the buildings that really deserve it – but here they've done something spectacular. Not by recourse to Banksy-style 'subversion', but seemingly from being in a secluded (but for the passing trains, extremely prominent) space, obscure enough and far enough from surveillance to be able to work on tags long enough to render them as lurid, jagged works of temporary art, the blaring purples, greens and oranges as fabulously artificial as a Joker production. Dazzle painting.

It's magnificent, exhilarating, and the only aesthetic response of any sort to the area's extreme modernity - but like the cranes and containers it can't be enjoyed unambiguously, each are a weird combination of glaringly visible and hermetic, neither really want to communicate anything much, and both are expressions of disconnection, of adjacent places appearing to be in different worlds. It's a chaos of illegibility (which is no doubt dense with reference to the thirty or so people in the know), shout-outs to places in Lithuania and obscure portraits, and caveats aside, it's wonderful. At the head of it all are the words, clear this time, 'THE OUTLAWS CRU'. Big up The Outlaws Cru, whoever you are.

Then another bridge, this time a rickety, antique ironwork construction which may once have led from Freemantle to the sea, but now takes the lost pedestrian back to civilisation of a sort. Around here you find a pair of trousers on a spike, some shoes in bushes, and on the steps of the bridge, the single word 'HELP'.

The signs of life are horribly unnerving. These look like women's trousers, while the shoes are not matching - are these left as a warning? They look like fragments from a rape, clues to a murder, something only accentuated by the sight of the containers just behind the trees. It can't get much more sinister than this, and accordingly the passageway opens out and begins to resemble somewhere you could walk a dog without being dumped in the bushes, or indeed without worrying about encountering strange temporal phenomena.

Here, the container port's cranes are no longer so visible, and the containers themselves take over – pile after pile after pile of them. Through the undergrowth a sign says 'City', and then the familiar city I know and love/hate comes into view – the ribbed-concrete tower of HSBC, the Brutalist stern of Wyndham Court, the clocktower of the Civic Centre on one side, and on the other, the postmodernist horrorshow of the Pirelli site. Which will be the subject of part two.