Thoughts for the Weekend & this Week’s Links

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The Enhancification Department.

I had a wander around historic Southampton yesterday with a group of students. First day back and they are tasked with designing a winery on a car park right next to the medieval city walls.

At first glance, it sounds mad. But Southampton has the longest surviving stretch of medieval walls in the UK, along with a network of underground vaults – many built as wine cellars between the 12th and 15th centuries. Suddenly, a winery doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

As readers of last week’s article will know, I love a walled city. Which is why I’ve always been amazed that in all the regeneration talk about Southampton, nobody has promoted the idea of rebuilding the walls. Instead, the conversation drifts towards another mall or a new IKEA.

Half of the original 1.25 miles of wall still stands, along with 19 of the 37 original gates and towers. Until Victorian expansion, the south and west walls sat right on the shoreline. But land reclamation pushed the sea back several hundred metres, and congestion pressures meant sections of wall were torn down to make way for growth. Thankfully, enough survived – thanks in no small part to conservationists.

Now, conservationists are like football referees: tyrants unless they blow the whistle your way. Occasionally you allow yourself the fleeting thought that they’re “just doing their job.” Mostly, you resent them. (Traffic wardens sit in a category of their own: broad hatred, no exceptions.)

But credit where it’s due – Southampton’s conservationists resisted the pressure to sweep away more walls, towers, gates and vaults. They saved just enough to keep things interesting.

Here’s the problem, though. Conservation, by definition, is about keeping things as they are. It’s rarely about making them better. What Southampton – and most other places – needed was an Enhancification Department. A civic body whose job wasn’t just to conserve, but to enhance.

Because the best parts of our cities are nearly always the oldest parts. Show me one significant post-war town centre that’s better than what it replaced. Character, human scale, compactness, beauty – they all vanished in a puff of smoke, replaced by characterless sprawl and infill.

Yes, we’ve inserted some interesting buildings in recent times. But look at Bath: the most coherent urban centre in England. Walk three steps beyond the Georgian grid and the magic disappears instantly. All the brainpower of 20th-century architects, engineers and planners – and the result was ugliness. When all they really needed was a Georgian pattern book and the humility to copy it.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Cars and lorries meant streets needed to be wider; Victorian lanes weren’t fit for HGVs. But why did we feel compelled to drive highways through every town? The bypass saved towns from gridlock, but killed their centres. And once Tesco and friends realised the bypass was the prime spot, the heart of the town hollowed out.

That hollowing process is the physical manifestation of market economics:

A dense market town thrives until congestion grows.
Old shops and houses are knocked down for bigger buildings and car parks.
Congestion worsens, so a bypass is built.
The bypass opens up land for supermarkets and retail parks.
People stop shopping in the centre.
The market town suffocates, starved of oxygen.
Southampton (with a bit of help from bombs) followed this pattern, just on a bigger scale.

So what would I do now? Honestly, I think the horse has bolted. But, if I had a time machine, I’d go back to 1985 and hire the artist Christo, fresh from wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris, to wrap Southampton’s walls in white polypropylene. A stunt to put the city on the cultural map and force people to look again at its medieval core.

Conservation alone wasn’t enough – the real task should have been enhancing the walled city and making it the stage, not the backdrop. Build the malls, supermarkets, cinemas – but treat them like ocean liners moored against the old walls, linked by gangways into the historic centre. Big boxes at the edge, small streets at the heart.

That’s the job the Enhancification Department should have done. Not just preserving history, but amplifying it. Enhancing the things that make cities special, instead of hollowing them out.

Maybe that’s what my students, sketching their winery beside the walls, will think about too. Not just conserving the past, but finding ways to enhance it. And perhaps in 30 or 40 years, when the malls start to decay and lose their appeal, we’ll have another chance – and not need that time machine.

All the best