A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Owen Hatherley

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      Mountbatten Retail Park

      Leaving the deeply unprepossessing Southampton Central Station on its southern entrance, you can see the containers already, next to the grimy sheds of the Mountbatten Retail Park. The most immediately noticeable urban artefacts are the hotels. Hotels are, in my experience, the most reliably awful examples of British architecture built in the last thirty years, closely followed by the similar typology of Halls of Residence. Is this to do with some kind of national aversion to the concept of hospitality? Do their developers worry that architecture might deter custom? Or are they just unbelievably tight-fisted? This particular cluster of hotels was lucky enough to receive a specific denunciation from the hilarious, depressing weblog Bad British Architecture— a Novotel and an Ibis, similarly lumpen and blocky, aptly described by the blog’s writer the ‘Ghost of Nairn’ as ‘simply incompetent building, let alone design’. Its astounding crapness makes you wonder if there is a deliberate policy of discouraging cruise passengers from actually staying in the city. Across the road from them a Police Operational Command Unit is being erected to designs by multinational giants of shit Broadway Malyan. The site currently consists of a concrete frame and some brickwork, presumably to be In Keeping with something or other. There’s an onsite Christmas tree. This seasonal jollity is not continued by the police advertisements outside the station itself, which are all, rather staggeringly, about knives and knife crime, presenting those driving in from the M27 with another reason to avoid venturing any further than the malls.

      The major dockside building is the Solent Flour Mills, which, remarkably enough, is still working. Equally remarkably, there have to my knowledge been no proposals to turn it into a lottery-funded art gallery. It’s absolutely huge, and of course inaccessible to the public. The dock gates were built around the same time in the early 1930s. The clocks have all had their hands removed. The most salient thing about industrial architecture after Fordism, the old form of industrial organization based on centralization, high wages, collective bargaining and intensive, linear mass production, is the changeover from an architecture of light to an architecture of windowless enclosure. The Solent Mills are a fine example of a Fordist ‘daylight factory’, notable as much for expanses of glass as for expanses of brick. Conversely, post-Fordist industry (there is such a thing—the presumption that post-Fordist automatically equals post-industrial is seldom correct) is marked by sheds without glass, where the ideology of transparency is transferred to financial capital and its shiny office blocks. Even Ford’s own Transit works in the suburbs are windowless, a 1990s steel box looming over the top-lit earlier factory buildings. The de-industrialization of Southampton (which happened in train with the intensified automation of the container port) means that there are few windowless industrial sheds in the centre of town. There are, however, windowless leisure sheds.

      Solent Flour Mills