The Solent Way: Part Three

Portsmouth to Emsworth (16 miles)

It's some time since we last visited the Solent Way, the footpath that traverses a fairly diverse stretch of the coastline of southern England, so a two-post special dealing with two sections of the trail seems in order. This time, we're going to finish off the eastern end, from Portsmouth to Emsworth. I've put together a map of the route here.

It was not a particularly bright sort of day when I set out, the kind that suggests rain is moderately likely but may hold off long enough to avoid serious drenching, and presents the dilemma of whether to take the light raincoat or the serious monsoon-proof ski one that will end up being needless extra weight for most of the day.  Happily, the journey by rail from nearby Bitterne station is one I was looking forward to, not so much for the landscape (brief glimpse of the river, bland suburbia, trees, River Hamble, some fields, nearly a coastal view, dirty suburbia, city) but because I used to make this journey on several memorable occasions in order to get to the Isle of Wight.  This was for the Boys' Brigade Solent region summer jamboree-outing-thing (it wasn't called that really), a fun-filled day on the Isle of Wight involving building sandcastles and games such as trying to knock down piles of tin cans with a sandbag. The railway has changed a bit since then, not least with the withdrawal of the old slam-door rolling stock (and 'Please - shut the door!' notices) but also because it's no longer possible to go direct from Bitterne to Portsmouth Harbour on the hourly train without a change at Portsmouth and Southsea, a good-looking but strange split-level construction with the raised through tracks under a canopy, looking rather like the older elevated stations in Berlin.  Trundling out of the other end along the viaduct takes us past the Guildhall and two parks, a shopping centre and into the harbour station.  Portsmouth Harbour is a curious construction, for upon exiting the building one realises that it is actually a pier held up by wooden piles, with the sea lapping underneath the trains. There's HMS Warrior and the entrance to the historic dockyard, the masts of HMS Victory and the grey turrets of modern warships further inside, and the Gosport ferry still trundling across the harbour as when I came over last time.

The route of the Solent Way is a little vague (for which read  'completely and mercilessly unwaymarked') through the city, as paths often are in large conurbations, so I adopt the general principle of keeping as close to the shoreline as possible. This involves going under the railway and being carried along in a crowd to Gunwharf Quays, the shopping mall which was visible from the train. It's unusual in being open rather than a monolithic chamber like Southampton's effort, with shops arranged in 'streets' on the site and a large expanse of waterfront beyond. Here was at the base of the Spinnaker Tower, Portsmouth's landmark sail-like white pillar, observation levels glazed between the upper ribs. I'd been up it some years ago on a better day than today (there's a glass floor to titillate the nervous) and, as on the last outing, intended to use it as a yardstick to see how far I'd come.  Setting off past what was surely an 'if you need to ask the price, you can't afford it' category of ocean-going motor yacht (and we mean it, the thing was bigger than most ships sailing to America in the fifteenth century) I passed by a sunken pond which was being used as a boating lake for children. If your little ones have ever dreamed of piloting a somewhat unconvincing six-foot replica of a Type 42 destroyer, this is the place to come.

Immediately to the side of the shopping centre were some modern apartments in a parallel avenue, with an equally contemporary glazed tower a short distance away, attempting to be a skyscraper. I spotted what seemed like a likely route onwards to the right, which took me between blocks and past the entrance to the Isle of Wight ferry terminal. Portsmouth's service, operated by WightLink, is shorter than Southampton's and more frequent, but is compromised by limited space both here and at Fishbourne on the island, where a river estuary in a village is the only water deep enough to land a car ferry. The Portsmouth berth is tucked between two promontories and necessitates a sharp turn to access the landing ramp, both factors which limit the size of the vessels. Still, traffic seemed to be healthy - at least judging by the length of time it took me to cross the access road. Next door is the home of a maritime activity one does not most readily associate with Portsmouth: fishing.  Yes, the town has a modest fishing fleet, almost all decorated blue with unique rust areas and mostly concerned with the Solent's oyster and clam stocks.  The boats are moored in an inlet to the side of the ferry port (using the same harbour entrance) which I walked along the edge of to reach the spit known as Portsmouth Point. Classical music aficionados (that's most of my readership, then) will most readily associate this place with the jaunty overture composed by William Walton in 1925,  which is quite appropriate given the history of the area. Also known as Spice Island, it was the oldest port area in the town and handled a swift trade in imported goods, sailors on leave and all the paraphernalia necessary for these articles to flourish.  Although it's today an estate-agent's Christmas list, the character of the promontory has been pretty well preserved as the eighteenth-century, and the pubs are the same as the two depicted in the famous cartoon of the town.  (It's also the very start/end of the A3, should you ever need to know that for a pub quiz).


View Larger Map

Doubling back past all the pubs and finally pointing eastwards brought me to another notable feature of Portsmouth's history - the town walls. They're not quite as unique as Southampton's but just as extensive, enclosing public parks that were once the site of gun emplacements and parade grounds, and you can climb over most of the towers and promenades on top. There are various other points of interest along the way including a half-ruined church as a memorial to the armed forces and a view back across the harbour mouth to Gosport, as well as all the marine traffic steaming in and out. The Isle of Wight ferries mentioned earlier were the most numerous in this respect, but there was also a huge cross-channel ferry bound for Spain (I know this because it was the exact vessel my family sailed on a year ago) and a multitude of yachts. A little further along is Clarence Pier, which is a somewhat creative use of the term given that the 'pier' is little more than a funfair on some decking, reaching only a few yards out over the water.

Trade didn't seem particularly brisk despite this being a public holiday, with only the minority of the cars on the Sky Ways coaster containing any screaming patrons and most of the carousels at standstill, owners stood around looking bored.  Next to the funfair is another 'ride' of sorts - the Southsea hoverport. This is one end of the only commercial hovercraft service in the UK, which in combination with a bus service to the station manages to maintain a trade in zipping across to the island every half-hour on an 'air-cushion vehicle'.  I stood on the shingle next to the ramp eating a sandwich but couldn't yet see the craft promised on the arrivals board.  My patience was eventually rewarded when I spotted a small area of spray several hundred yards out, closer observation picking out the flashing beacon light and then the blue and red superstructure.

Another clear indication a hovercraft is approaching is the considerable noise of the twin engines as the thing flies at you across the waves, not really braking at all until the last moment when the thing theatrically drives up the beach, flinging spray everywhere, and rolls to a halt by pointing the jet thrusters in the opposite direction. The skirts then deflate as the fans power down and staff push a set of aircraft steps up to the doors.  I must get round to travelling on this thing...


Moving along the shoreline opposite Southsea Common come more attractions: the D-Day Museum complete with 360" cinema and the Overlord Embroidery, which is intended to compliment to Bayeux Tapestry; the Pyramids swimming pool (you guessed it, it's in the shape of said cuboid, 80's plastic looking just a bit in need of refurbishment) and Southsea Castle, which dates back to Tudor times, although not the black-and-white lighthouse.  I happened to look back here and see that steaming out of port was a huge grey warship, which I was later able to identify by its markings as HMS Daring, a new destroyer. I presumed it was off to the Indian Ocean, either as support for the war in Afghanistan or else fighting Somali pirates, but the reality may have been more mundane, just a training exercise or official visit. It swept past, as much as several thousand tonnes of vessel can sweep past, and headed down the side of the Island.

Once Southsea Pier has been passed (more plasticky sideshows, but at least a proper pier) the shore becomes less interesting, shingle and hardy grasses on one side and apartments on the other, and presently the path has to turn off altogether to avoid a fort at the mouth of the bay. We now have to start heading north up the other side of the peninsula (technically an island, but only by virtue of the small channel cutting across the top) to get round Langstone Harbour, which is the tidal area cutting Hayling Island off from Portsea and the mainland.

The ten minutes it takes to walk between one shore and the other do not sufficiently convey the contrast between them. The broad shingle beach is left behind to traverse a park (nice tree-lined path, not-so-nice blocks of flats) and suburban residential streets before the Way rejoins the shore just next to a pub. Now the sea is in a shallow natural harbour between Portsea and Hayling Island, full of sandbanks and mud and all sorts of submarine features that the Coastguard would prefer you didn't get stuck in. The boating culture has changed from car ferries and warships to moored yachts and small fishing vessels, including further down the road the small passenger ferry across the harbour mouth to Hayling Island. I now have to walk all the way back up the side of Portsea Island, cross a road bridge at the top and briefly traverse a narrow waterside path by the A27 and A3M, which is not particularly interesting territory, the mud flats of Langstone Harbour to one side and marsh beds to the other with a skyline of flats, industrial units and scrubby plants.  At one point I have to backtrack and divert along a parallel driveway to avoid mud pools on a grassy path, such is the proximity to the water.  The road bridge, one of only two fully accessible entry points to the island (the others are a motorway and a railway) is windy indeed, being positioned over an open channel of water. It's then half a mile walking along the precariously narrow harbour wall, sans railings, until one reaches Farlington Marshes.

On the map, this area looks like an annoyance, two miles going round the edge of a peninsula to end up only slightly further down the path from where you started. It actually provides a fairly diverting change of scenery, an open landscape more like the flats of Norfolk or the Netherlands, with a sunken wetland at the centre and a path going round the edge on the sea dyke. Wading birds dip at the pools and reeds, or flock overhead, and even the noise of the motorway is lost to the fresh sea breezes.  The area was also used a decoy for German bombing raids in WWII, by blacking out Portsmouth and putting lights on the peninsula in order to fool pilots they were aiming at the city.  All this must offer some great photo opportunities given great patience, a good lens and a sunset, but none of these were forthcoming at the current moment. It is at about this point on a long walk - ten, eleven miles - when things start to get a bit achy and one has to force oneself to have a break and drink more, especially given my pace and the wind around here.  I could just make out in the distance the arch of the Hayling Island bridge, and tried to estimate the distance to it, reckoning if I could get there in 1 hour that would be achievable and would be sufficient motivation to get to the end and not cop out at one of the nearby stations. Looking the other way, Spinnaker Tower was a distant needle, appearing as far away as it had been at Lee-on Solent on the last leg.

The path now reaches the edge of Havant and takes on a rhombus-shaped detour that actually is genuinely annoying; up a dirty creek, over a road bridge and along the road past various industrial yards, through some woods and past a cement works to arrive twenty minutes later only a short way across the creek where this sentence started. Thankfully, from this point onwards it's a pretty straight line to the Hayling Island bridge road across some more shingle and marshes. The next signpost, stating that Emsworth is a mere two miles away (which I don't believe) happens to sit on the path of a long-gone railway to the island, now a cycle track  Actually, there still remain the stumps of the bridge that carried the 'Hayling Billy' across the strait parallel to the road bridge, which is not too unpleasing a construction either. At the other side of the Hayling road are some old-looking buildings including what was obviously once a windmill, and a duckpond.  Fairly desirable area, this. A little further on is a curious section of footpath so far unique on my travels - one which is only accessible at low tide. It traverses the shingle in front of a sea wall and as a result the ground cover is an expanse of damp pebbles rather than real footpath, although I had been fortunate to have arrived here when the tide was ages away. Hopping back onto terra firma takes one through a graveyard and some fields before a last bit of expensive real-estate seafront.


View Larger Map

By the time I arrived in Emsworth the sun was out - isn't that nice?  The town has a curved harbour wall around an area known as the mill pond which is wide enough to serve as a promenade, with little information panels about the history of the town (mostly relating to fishing and boats). The exact end point of the Solent Way is a little vague as the waymarking finishes before the promenade, so I chose the little information hut (a pleasant Victorian civic construction with a tiled roof, I should add, not some plastic horror) as the very eastern terminus, only a few yards inside Hampshire . One could easily continue walking from this point, for the Wayfarer's Walk and Staunton Way to the north and the Sussex Border Path to the east join here, and the E9 coastal path continues on to Dover via the South Downs.  I, however, had done seventeen miles already and headed for the station with the eastern half of the trail completed. Next time, the forest.

Langstone harbour and Portsdown

Gallery

Ryde, on the Isle of Wight

Portsmouth Point

The Isle of Wight ferries

Portsmouth fishing fleet

The Museum

Back in April, the centennial anniversary of the ill-fated voyage of S.S. Titanic put Southampton, if temporarily, at the centre of the world's attention. Unsurprisingly, myself and other friends and family members were most readily involved in musical contributions to the commemorations, not least the massive performance of A Sea Symphony in the docks on the actual anniversary of the sailing.  A more lasting result of all this was that the much-awaited SeaCity Museum opened its doors to visitors, finally furnishing the city with a maritime museum of suitable dimensions for it's historical significance. And today, I finally got around to making a visit - with the intention of publishing a review here, of course.

As much as anything else, the creation of such an attraction represents the city council finally getting off their backsides and actually making something happen with regards to getting some tourist footfall (and income) into the town, although it's a pity that, as has happened before, the (now defunct) Tory administration were claiming credit for it all when in fact the project was initiated during the years of a hung council.  There was a debacle on a national scale during the planning stage when the council tried to sell paintings and a sculpture from the city art gallery to fund the project, and only backed down when the Tate found some legal clause forbidding them from doing so (massive public opposition is much easier to ignore these days). An added contrivance is that all Southampton addresses are generously being sent a free ticket, except that to use it you have to visit together as a household, can only visit outside school holidays in 2012 and not during the first six days of opening. In other words, if you want to take your whole family, you have to have a free Saturday or Sunday or else an inset day which you take off work, and you won't be the first to get in. Typically for the ID Era, they'll also want proof of residence, so if you have a family of three and were hoping to sneak in Aunty Mabel from Whitstable when she came to visit, sorry, forget it; she'll have to pay.

Still, it's a huge leap forward from the little maritime museum that preceded it, housed in a medieval wool house opposite the ferry terminal.  It was interesting, filled with models of ships and bits of anchors and compasses and other delightful nautical clutter, but hopelessly outdated and greatly under-representing the port. Although the inside of the new museum is bespoke, only a little actual new building needed to take place.  The building housing the galleries was built in the 1930s as part of the Civic Centre, and used to contain the law courts and the police station as well as an elegantly thin tower with a four-face clock at the top.  In a wonderful gesture towards the city's heritage, the clock bells chime the first phrase of Southampton resident Isaac Watts' hymn O God, Our Help In Ages Past on the hour. The coppers moved out into a rather Orwellian monolith overlooking the docks in 2010 and since then the entire East Wing has been refreshed and refitted to contain the exhibition halls. The only bit of construction needed was a rather more angular gallery at the north end, replacing some flowerbeds with a series of triangular sections concertinaed into one another, presumably to suggest waves, sails or the bow of an ocean liner. This also forms the shape of the museum's logo, which looks like an upside-down factory with a chimney. They've at least tried a little to blend it into the existing structure with a nice façade of Portland Stone and some smoked glass.

Let's go inside...

The entrance lobby sets out the tone of the museum.  It's not huge, with today just a single attendant behind the ticket desk and a single staircase and lift to the first floor.  The wing is listed, and a lot of interest is in seeing how they've managed to change the building's function whilst maintaining the heritage features, something which has been done rather well. Other than the contemporary block-colour and sans serif style of inserted walls, the original Portland stone and marble is the main interior texture of the building.  The ceiling vaults of the upstairs atrium have a pleasing decorative pattern to them, and the signs directing entrances to the courtrooms have been retained.  One side of the floor, formerly Court Three, is on the general history of Southampton, and seems like a sensible place to begin. The false roof has been left open in places to show the ornate painted wood panelling of the original court, and one can see the coat of arms at the far end too. Space does not permit a full description of every exhibit in the room, suffice to say there were sections on most periods of history from neolithic to modern, and appropriate artifacts.  Beyond this room was a smaller one containing a huge model of the Queen Mary (from the old museum) and a series of displays on various immigrations to and through the city - more artistic than informative, it has to be said, preferring representative objects over things like statistics.

Unsurprisingly, the other half of the exhibition space is given over to the Titanic.  There was an immediate focus on the actual people on the ship rather than the vessel itself - it wasn't built or registered here, after all - and especially the crew, who were mostly Southamptoners.  This was done through following the situation of five individuals on the ship, from Captain Smith to a fireman, through the various stages of the voyage and sinking.  Notable were the wall listing all the items taken on board the ship at Southampton (did you know they carried horse hair and opium?) and the wireless operator's room.  The main part of local interest was the room dealing with the survivors. The floor was the now-famous map of 1912 Southampton with every residence that lost a crew member marked in red.  I also liked that the other courtroom had been used as a space explaining the Titanic disaster enquiry, still left as a court with jury benches, dock and judge's seat. Downstairs, in the new pointy-roofed bit was a special exhibition (presumably the first of many) on the legacy of the Titanic and the public's lasting fascination with it.  There was an interesting wall comparing five films from the 20th century about the ship, and another with a huge variety of objects essentially cashing in on the name, from beer to dolls.  Other areas dealt with the unanswered questions about the voyage - was the ship going too fast, could the lookouts see enough, and the morality of exploring the wreck. One wonders what future exhibitions might occupy this space.

Things to like:

 

The interactive stuff 

This was all very well-done, chiefly because all the touchscreens and videos were generally used for the most appropriate purpose, showing and explaining things that couldn't be done so well using static displays and information panels.  Some were more child-orientated than others (drive sail the Titanic using a real wheel and telegraph! Rub the screen to 'dig' for buried Saxon treasure!) but all were educational.  There were some other nice touches too, like the 'stained glass window' that was actually a subtly moving projection (watch long enough and you could see the bird dislodge an apple from the tree which fell on the medieval trader's foot) and the Roman video. I personally liked the circular table with an overview map, which cycled round every period of the city's history every ten minutes and allowed several different people at a time to zoom into the relevant areas and read little hotspots of information.

Size and content

 

I ended up spending about as much time in there as I wanted to spend (in fact I could have stayed longer but it was closing), which I count as a success bearing in mind I'm the sort of visitor who sets out intending  to read all the information and look at all the objects.  Everything in there was also interesting, relevant and objectively presented (although interestingly, a companion on this visit noted perhaps a slight left-of-centre tone, particularly the focus on ordinary working people and several mentions of trade union involvement, both of which accurately reflect the town's political direction for most of its modern history).  That said, see criticisms below.

Looks 

 

The conversion from law courts to museum has been carried out with great sensitivity to the building and as a result the whole place looks great.  One of the interesting features, which the architects may or may not have been aware of is the feeling, of being in a transient space, as if one is able to observe the different stages of history just by being there, and there is certainly no sense of having hidden or thrown out the previous function of the building - indeed, it is purposely left on show in places.  Full marks to the builders.

And a few things for improvement:

 

A bit perfunctory in places.

 

Although the exhibits manage to cover a fair chunk of Southampton's history, there are some significant omissions. At no point was it actually explained why the area became a port in the first place, nothing on the actual operation of the docks or the liner trade, nothing on other aspects of transport (the railway, the airport and flying boats), and nothing on important periods such as the Georgian spa industry or the Blitz. One appreciates that space was a little limited, and that the conservators had to pick and choose, but with the potential of interactive features physical room need not have been a hindrance in this respect. In particular, the business of the port operations would surely have been a publicity opportunity that an organisation such as ABP would have seized upon, yet there was no mention of the modern container port.  In a similar vein, several things that were featured were inadequately explained. Had I not some knowledge of early modern history I feel I would have been mystified as to who the Huguenots were and why they were fleeing from France - and even then it would have been nice to read more than a single excerpt from the digitised account book belonging to the businesswoman named Judith. Why the Romans and Saxons actually settled in this area was also barely explained.  Some of the Titanic section also felt a bit padded-out - display cases spaced just a bit further apart than they might have been, not quite enough detail. The only exception was the economic background to the era and its crew, which I didn't know about previously.

It's tempting to say that this was solely due to budget constraints: this is all we could afford; is a museum worth it when we have to cut front-line services, that sort of thing; but it is also perhaps symptomatic of a more general modern tendency to assume that people have short attention spans and won't appreciate detailed descriptions or masses of stuff to look at.  I don't think that's a good way of setting out on an entity like this - surely a good museum is one which caters for many people with different levels of interest about different things, each one of whom who will want to see some things in great detail but skip over others?  A museum should also be a starting-point for further private research into areas of particular interest, and as such ought to at least introduce as much as possible to the visitor.

English only

 

Given the international nature of the city - and the fact that this is a key feature of all the bits about immigration - it seems surprising that there was not a single sign, map, or other piece of information in anything other than English.  The city council publish documents in nearly every tongue under the sun, and rightly so when there are so many languages being spoken here, but not at the museum. One would at least have expected French and Polish. 

Would I recommend a visit? I would say yes, but not to expect the experience to be on same scale as the maritime museums in Liverpool or Belfast. It is more of an afternoon visit than a whole day's attraction. One thing I can't really judge is how interesting a non-Southampton visitor would find it  - I was not particularly impressed by Bristol's municipal museum recently due to finding it too 'localist' - and in fact also thought many of the same other criticisms about that as I have with SeaCity. The general impression of the place was that it was more concerned with people than systems or physical things, which might be less appealing to the outside visitor. However, the widespread appeal of the Titanic should at least provide a good level of familiarity.

To the ends of the earth

Yesterday I was able to travel to London and go to the Science Museum. Whilst such an undertaking may seem ill-advised on a Saturday in school holidays, I needed to visit now because it was my only chance to see Universe of Sound: The Planets, an exhibition featuring Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia performing Holst's eponymous suite, as well as a new commission from Joby Talbot entitled Stars, Systems, Worlds, Infinity.  All this was intended to demonstrate the workings of the symphony orchestra and its constituent instruments, and as such each section of the orchestra has its own curtained 'chamber' with the surround sound and video matched to give the impression of sitting amongst the players at that location.

I'd initially been alerted to its existence by a friend who is working as a guide at the exhibition, and who was very pleased to see me there. It turned out I'd fortuitously arrived during a lull in visitors (apparently it can become quite busy with families, and indeed the installation was extended by a month to cope with visitor numbers) and was able to try my hand at percussion in Mars and Venus, playing along to the suite.  This is harder than it might seem even for a seasoned performer, not least counting tens of bars in rests or held rolls and then coming off at the right moment (snare drum technique is also not nearly as intuitive as it looks). Anticipating that many visitors will not necessarily read music, there are helpful video screens in which players from the orchestra explain what you need to do and guide you in with the help of some Guitar Hero-style graphics.  I gave the tam-tam a resounding whack and then played some gentle glockenspiel notes before my guide showed me over to the conducting pods. 'These are really cool' he explained, demonstrating how the motion sensors would detect my hand movements as I followed the beats on the 'conductors-eye' screen. The simulator is limited to controlling volume and showing accuracy of beating; the music will continue even if you stop and there is no way to control tempo or interpretation.  (I suspect no current technology is sophisticated enough to interpret the nuances of a conductor's direction in the way human players do, and indeed the facial and non-beating gestures I made were pointless). But it is a good way of demonstrating what the conductor must do.

Even as somebody who regularly plays in several orchestras there was a great deal of interest in walking round to a different section to my own, and hearing the sound of the orchestra from another point - wind, brass, organ.  The curators had helpfully put out the instrumental parts in their respective chambers for those who could read them, so I would spend each Planet following what I though was most interesting - harps in Saturn, upper strings in Uranus, horns in the Talbot piece.  Possibly the most interesting part was a split-screen showing variously the horn, bassoon, trumpet, violin and timpanist.  Below them was a continuous commentary of their thoughts as they were playing the piece (presumably transcribed from listening through afterwards).  This included a little banter over virtuosic passages, but also fascinating insights into the actual business of performing the music - the trumpeter explaining how the repeated notes in Mars became uncomfortable to play by the end, the violinist explaining how he watches both the conductor and the leader at once, the timpanist counting rests and the conductor watching his stick. The most touching was the principal horn trying to articulate what it was like to play the solo that opens Venus, how she just let herself play it and trusted she had judged the acoustic of the room and the other players that followed her.  It was a wonderfully intimate moment to see the other players responding appreciatively and her satisfaction at performing what was essentially just four notes, but notes of such significance which had been entrusted to her.  Next to this screen was another showing Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and, in a similar vein, his thoughts on the music and its merits.  'In two minutes he has changed the character utterly' he mused, a little after the aforementioned horn solos in The Bringer of Peace.  Also insights into the business of conducting: 'Muti used to watch for the brass players' embouchure to place the downbeat - sometimes the conductor is led by the orchestra'; 'what makes the rhythm avoid becoming repetitive is that he is always changing what is happening around it...sometimes it's 3+2 and sometimes 2+3...you have to be very controlled and not get carried away by the excitement of the music'. Best of all; 'the sound of the symphony orchestra...something you cannot get from anything else' and 'People who don't really listen to classical music, don't know much about the orchestra - they still know The Planets'.

I must have spent nearly two hours - two complete performances of all the music - in the gallery and eventually left back through the clocks and hourglasses to eat lunch. I was very pleased to discover that although a little out of the way on the first floor, the installation is right above the main ground floor gallery which is open to the roof, and so Holst was being broadcast right over all the cars and steam locomotives and rockets where most of the museum's visitors were.  Whilst one might, being critical, wonder what a piece of music based on astrology is doing in a science museum, I am tempted to include this brief summary of the exhibition in my 'myth of elitism' series, as it is yet another laudable method of opening up to the public the joy and wonder of classical music and the amazing worlds of sound created by the orchestra.  The Planets, although overplayed in parts (I'm thinking especially Mars and Jupiter), deserves the fame it has achieved, and has always been a favourite piece of mine, particularly Neptune with its glittering textures, chilling dissonances and that extraordinary use of voices (something I pay homage to in A Child of the Snows, and which also featured in the Talbot piece). I hope Holst's music, for all his later misgivings about its popularity, will continue to bring many more souls under the spell of the orchestra.

Having picked up some reduced-price chamber music from Chappells (I wanted a score of Holst, but they only had big ones which were overpriced) I then raced home and got back in enough time to see the Olympic Torch being carried through my city. Yes, it was historic. Yes, we all briefly felt part of something big, proud that our largely unremarkable town was a small part of a huge event. But I have to say I will remember the exhibition with more affection than the minutes spent on a street corner, with all the vapid sponsors' stooges faking a party in the drizzle and finally a man with a surprisingly small gold stick running past in few seconds. For all its ceremony, the Olympic relay felt ordinary and mundane; Holst, by contrast, seemed otherworldly and transcendental, filled with wonder and fascination. Better still, it is more accessible. One does not have to wait in the rain or fight through a crowd to experience the music, it is available to anyone as long as there are ears to hear it. That, surely, is the more lasting and generous legacy?

The Solent Way: Part 2

Hamble to Portsmouth (14 miles)

After deciding that it was too nice a weekend to waste indoors, I set out on the Solent Way again.  Continuing down the eastern side of Southampton Water, this stage will take us from where we finished last time in Hamble right into the city of Portsmouth.  Having prepared a packed lunch, I was duly down at the station at 9.45 to catch the slow train a few stops down the line to Hamble.

Hamble station (Street View) has the charming attribute of being in the middle of a field.  It's pretty basic, to be honest, just a pair of concrete platforms and a ticket machine next to the road bridge leading into the village. This will mean I have to walk about a mile to reach the quayside and pick up the Solent Way, but I don't particularly mind as there's enough of interest along the main street.  Hamble has plenty of history before new-money sailing businesses came along, and was for most of the last century an important area in the development of aviation. There were not one, but two, airfields in the town; one which just about clings on as a plant for General Electric aviation, and another which is buried under an 80's up-market housing estate.  There's plenty of evidence about though, firstly the Folland Gnat replica serving as a gate guard to the GE site, then further on some information panels with pictorial histories of the various planes and seaplanes built and tested here, and finally a silver miniature Spitfire mounted on swoopy poles as if turning a steep bank over the road.

The rest of the architecture bar the church is typical Georgian brick houses lining the steep lane down to the water (Street View).  The town of Hamble today (or, properly, Hamble-le-Rice, (Street View)) is largely concerned with the construction, maintenance and excise of boats and their accessories.  All kinds, although on the basis of the many vessels moored in the river, it's mostly private yachts that are most at home here. The Hamble River is only about half a mile from ending its modest course into the Solent, so it's fairly deep and allows a convenient base from which to launch one's forty-foot status symbol for a jaunt around the island.  Appropriately enough, I'm heading for a boat trip right now, but not one involving hoisting sails or leaning backwards over the side.  Instead I'm going to take one of the non-walking bits of the Solent Way, the ferry.

On the Hamble-Warsash ferry

I like the Hamble-Warsash ferry. It has a pleasing feeling of being a service rather than just a business enterprise.  To reach it you have to go down onto a gated jetty which looks a tiny bit not-public (with walking boots and a bag I got a funny look from four muscular waterproofed blokes leaving the pontoon), step onto the ferry via an ungated 'people scoop' opening at the front, and give the ferryman £1.50. The boat is pink (apart from the rusty bits) whereas the last time I rode on it, which must have been at least fifteen years ago, it was a more sober white. The captain, though, looks like a real proper sailor in the Captain Birdseye vein, with a white beard, an Arran sweater and a nautical cap. I am the only passenger and he sets off immediately I am aboard.  The passage across the river takes about five minutes, although this is variable depending on the number of yachts gong down the main channel rather than across it, and the number of parked boats it is necessary to weave through, including another similarly pink vessel used for dredging (according to the sign painted on the side). We seem to come alarmingly close to many of them, but the captain's been doing this since he was in short trousers and with a deft hand steers the Emily across the deep water channel and up to a jetty on the Warsash side without anything unfortunate involving anchor cables and the propeller.  There's quite a crowd gathered over here, Saturday traffic clearly being enough to justify getting out the largest vessel in the fleet, with the patronage mostly consisting of families returning from a stroll or dog-walking.  At the end of the jetty is a charming little ferry shelter (also in pink), with a confusing notice informing passengers they'd be better off not using it but instead waiting at the end of jetty, just so the ferryman can be sure they actually want the boat and aren't just resting their legs.

The Hamble River

Off the ferry, the trail goes down a shallow slope to the small quayside at Warsash (Street View). There's a nice pub here as well as a monument noting the area's involvement with D-Day in 1944 - in fact the first of several I'll pass on this walk.  A bit further on at the mouth of the Hamble River is the College of Maritime Studies, with its distinctive jetty and practice scaffold full of orange lifeboats extending out from the land. There's a salt marsh a little way inland, Hook Lake, which looks very tranquil. By contrast, the Solent is buzzing, with ferries, container ships, yachts, jet-skis and freighters punting up and down on voyages of various distances.  Fawley once again looms large across the water, although as I move on the flare stack will become a useful marker to determine how far I've come.  It's a warm day, with a breeze just strong enough to cool without being a problem.

Appropriately enough to lead on from the last paragraph, the next feature we come to is the Solent Breezes holiday park. The Solent Way used to follow the shoreline across the front of the static caravans, but that's not the case now because a lot of the shoreline isn't there any more. It's a cliff top, you see, and cliff tops have a habit of getting undercut by the waves and falling into the water, such that the trailers with the best view are now the ones most in danger of disappearing over it. The authorities realised that it was probably sensible to take walkers somewhere else than over a crumbling bit of sandstone, so there's now a detour round the back of the caravans and past a National Grid transformer station to join the rest of the cliffs which are holding up a bit better. You can still get through the bushes where the path would originally have come out, and see just how precarious it is.  Whilst the caravans are still at a safe distance, for now, there's at least one section of fence which hasn't long for this world.

Carrying on along the cliff-top, the view of the surrounding landscape becomes notably more expansive. The Isle of Wight's quite clearly outlined even in today's hazy air, a reminder that I'm reaching the point where the shoreline starts to turn to meet up with the English Channel.  Across the water the New Forest gradually recedes as the estuary widens away from the drum of Calshot castle perched at the end of its eponymous spit.  From this point onwards I start to scan the eastward horizon periodically for an important landmark indicating journey's end - the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth. No sign yet, but sooner or later the slender white spire will appear in the distance. After a mile or two, the path descends past a small beach, goes up another modest hillock and then becomes flat again at sea level and a row of small buildings appears. They're technically beach chalets, but most are half-way to being proper bungalows, with double-glazed verandas, solar panels or wind turbines for power (not in short supply here) and most with an upturned dinghy outside.  I join the various hand-holding couples, surfers, kite-flyers, paddlers and dogs flagrantly ignoring the 'private beach' notice and carry on around the curve of the bay (not missing the opportunity to use a thoughtfully-placed toilet stop) towards Hill Head.  This is another geography that's changed a lot over time, being the mouth of the River Meon. The sandbanks that gave this its original name of Hell Head have been tidied up along with the construction of a harbour and sluice gate for the river channel.  The other way, inland, everything's rather special. The river now ends in a giant reed bed, Tichfield Haven. which means that local twitchers have the chance to spot. It's quite a striking contrast between the colourful harbour behind and the serenity of the brown estuary before.

View Larger Map

All the beach huts here are green, and a few are open with their tenants inside enjoying the weather.  There's still not really a proper beach but this hasn't tempered the availability of watersports, chiefly sailing in small one-man boats and kite-surfing.  I haven't the faintest idea how to sail a dinghy but it looks highly diverting - at least nearly as good as walking. I always wonder whether anybody else is going the same way as me or as far.  It's remarkable, given the reasonable probability that somebody else may be walking a particular stretch of a particular footpath, that one never follows or engages in swapping places with another hiker, the way that you keep up with another car on a motorway.  Clearly everybody must have a sufficiently different pace or timing that no two path-followers run together. I keep stopping to take pictures too, which mixes things up a bit.

Presently there's a village and the Solent Way diverts a little round beach-front properties. The more urban section brings more people to share the footway with and I have to weave around pushchairs, dogs and wobbling teenage scooters. Horse riders hold up the traffic going the other way.  Periodically, an unidentified engine noise from the other side of the embankment is followed by the appearance overhead of a little yellow glider, which nervously turns over the sea and heads back to the landing strip before it runs out of sky. A mile or so further along the shore is the first proper town on this walk, Lee-on-the-Solent.  Lee (Street View) looks like a proper seaside town from the start, with a long straight road parallel to and slightly above the shore, neat grass and conservatively-styled apartments.  In the centre of the town are some nice quasi-Art-Deco shop fronts and a raised promenade area which add to the ambiance.  There used to a be a pier too, although that's long since vanished.  The amusement arcade on the beach front and the car park behind it used to be the terminus of the little-used Lee-on-Solent railway, which was a distinctly unprofitable entity and soldiered on as little more than a parliamentary service until 1931, with six men and a dog on the last passenger train. There's also a slipway, which is handy for the jet-skiers to launch from, although it's size seems to suggest some greater purpose. It's really very large indeed. Mysteriously large - in fact it's big enough to be used a car park. Oh...

Looking through the resulting break in the embankment I realise why. At the top of the slope, across the road, two huge propellers and a cabin with a radar assembly on top tower over a huge white superstructure. There's a sort of drawbridge-like door at the front of this massive machine, on which its name is written: hovercraft.

Several 'air-cushion vehicles' at Lee

I like hovercraft. They have an endearingly eccentric character about them; slightly cobbled-together from unlikely combinations of components like an assorted Lego set, as if nobody has quite worked out how to neaten it all up yet, a mad idea that has not yet realised quite how excessively complicated it has become. They are the only machines I know which have floppy bits as part of the design and make an amazing racket even before they move anywhere. One can only imagine the joy of test-driving  - or more accurately, test-flying - an early model and finding that not only did your bizarre invention actually work, it also went like the clappers on both land and water.  This corner of the military airfield at HMS Daedalus is the world's only Hovercraft Museum and houses seventy different 'air cushion vehicles' of diverse sizes and designs, some in working order, others still under restoration. I particularly like the craft I first spotted, the giant SR.N4 The Princess Margaret, mostly for the four massive propeller towers mounted on top that look like they were just put there to impress, like the tail fins on 1950s American cars.  This is a machine that can carry sixty cars, 170 passengers and still exceed 70mph! - which in 1969 was almost as exciting as putting a space rocket on the moon, especially when the whole project was a British endeavour.  This site is closed to the public most of the time (apart from visits by special arrangement) but there is a poster advertising open days in the forthcoming months.

Much danger lurks at Browndown.

After the crowds (and it really is crowded, everyone's outside this afternoon) of Lee the Solent Way comes up against a sturdy-looking fence and a gate with warning notices, which luckily happens to be open. Sometimes you have to divert around the next two miles, for Browndown is an irregularly-used military range, although they no longer use live fire here. The landscape is lonely and bleak in the extreme. Civilisation, houses and streets and yachts are not far away at all, yet all are hidden beyond the shingle and the scrubby, arid sandbanks behind. After an indeterminate period of time struggling across the millions of pebbles I come across the ruined remains of some small buildings, not knowing whether they were once complete or whether they were built this way to simulate the effects of bombing and shelling.  The place is entirely a desolate military landscape, parched and barren even when warfare is absent from it.  I imagine this is what it must be like in a nuclear winter; only the stones and the hardiest of grasses survive.  Actually, my pontificating on the desolation of war is some way from the truth: if you know where to look there's life here that you won't find elsewhere precisely because the area is less well-trod: birds, lizards, grasses and algae unique to the Solent coast. It you look a little further, the place offers the first sight of a landmark I'd been looking out for all day: Spinnaker Tower, where I'll end, in the centre of Portsmouth.

Nonetheless, I'm glad to leave and rejoin Stokes Bay on a tarmacked promenade with families and dogs and ice-cream. I pass an old fort which is now a museum of diving: as if to prove this, there are old iron minisubs on plinths outside, slightly rusted and with fogged glass.  A while further on, at the lifeboat station (entirely funded by the local community), the coastguard tractor sits ready to tow a lifeboat out of the water, but clearly nobody needs rescuing right now, firstly as the sea's so calm and secondly because the crew are in a staff meeting, audible through the open shutters.  After this the landscape turns back to grass (again very neat and Windows XP, must be something in this area) and reaches the southernmost point of this walk - indeed, the entire Solent Way this side of Southampton.  It's a location offering a more-than-decent view of Portsmouth, which made it an idea location for defending the city from the French/Spanish/French/Germans/Germans depending on in what period of history it was deemed necessary. To this effect the army built Fort Gilkicker, a curiously-shaped structure which formed part of the chain of brick blockhouses in this area.  In the nineteenth-century a huge earth bank was added to the front which it's possible to climb (I didn't spot the steps until after getting back down on hands and knees and picking up several thorny plants in the process) although you won't see much inside other than the modern radar installation and a lone guard, indifferent to the teenagers on the other side of his fence.

Fort Gilkicker

It's reminder of the importance of the armed forces to this area, chiefly the Navy, but all the services have a presence here and have done for the last few centuries.  The next section of shore is completely taken up with military properties, including the controversial Haslar Immigration Removal Centre and the hospital next door.  Because of this, the Solent Way has to divert and crosses a golf course with the wearily familiar 'Private land - keep on path' notices (which always translate as 'We wish we could prevent you walking right next to our exclusive lawn but legally we can't, so we'll just make you feel as unwelcome as possible'), then some suburban avenues, then a tunnel-like road closed in by the high walls of military barracks and whatever else they have here (Street View).  At the end of the road there's a slender arched bridge (Street View) over Haslar Marina and its thousands of yachts. Over the water is the one military installation you can visit - HMS Alliance, which forms the greater part of the Submarine Museum. After a career sneaking around underwater and subsequently sitting on the quayside it's in need of some restoration work, and looks it too, certainly not the shade of black it started out in.

I've very nearly at the end of my journey but as there's a ferry across the harbour every six minutes there's time for a short detour to get a picture of Holy Trinity Church.  It's an attractive building in dark brick with narrow square tower, more like German or Italian ecclesiastical architecture than the usual British block.  It's also where my trio gave a concert two weeks ago (the whiff of incense is still in the air). Arriving at Gosport waterside there's a magnificent view of Portsmouth in the late afternoon light.  I've never had a chance to ride the Gosport Ferry and am pleased to find it a very efficient way to cross the water (although I wasted half my ticket as they only issue returns). It's by far the best way to enter Portsmouth, what with a superb view of the Spinnaker Tower, HMS Warrior and all the various categories of naval ships and ferries steaming in and out of port. The green and white vessel only requires four minutes to leave Gosport and dock again at the Harbour station, which puts me neatly finishing underneath the tower I'd been using as a guidepost throughout the afternoon.

Panorama of Portsmouth from Gosport

And that's it for now. Suffice to say I returned to Southampton, after waiting 40 minutes to change trains, to find the city in jubilant mood after a 2-0 victory over Doncaster.

The concert

A week ago I had the chance to take part in one of the many Titanic commemorative events taking place around the country. We've already covered how closely linked Southampton is to the ship, so it was quite appropriate that the City of Southampton Orchestra were doing a special concert in the docks.  It was a good one.

We all, orchestra and choir, dutifully arrived at Dock Gate Four on Monday evening for the rehearsal. I'd long wanted to drive past the barriers at the entrance and go inside, so was very pleased to be let through and allowed to drive along the access road to the cruise terminal.  It was a pretty rough night, strong winds and heavy rain heightening the machined, industrial character of the place with everything either floodlit or picked out by small points of light.  This whole area is artificial, concrete deposited into the Solent at the end of the nineteenth century to expand the port, and is imposing rather than picturesque; conceptually united, if we can be generous enough to suggest an artistic element in discussing it, by the fact that most objects are very big.  On the left is the smaller Ocean cruise terminal, whilst ahead to the right rows and rows of Hondas and, in a car park MINIs. After crossing a single track of railway line, a huge diesel locomotive looms up alongside the road, sitting somewhat ominously with its lights on and coupled to a rake of auto-carriers. Cars are a major import here, but there are also giant rolls of cable, dumper trucks and, at the end of the promontory, two huge grain silos.

After driving a good half-mile, I find the venue. The concert to be held in the grand arena of the Queen Elizabeth II cruise terminal, next to which is the exact spot Titanic sailed from and where Cunard liners still depart from to this day.  The building is a bland modern block, which is a particular shame as what preceded it was the wonderful 1950 Ocean Terminal, built in Art Deco style with modern innovations such as power gangways to the ship and conveyor belts for luggage. In an exceptional act of cultural vandalism, Associated British Ports bulldozed the entire structure on inheriting it via privatisation of the docks in 1983. Had it survived, it would actually have made a fantastic venue for the museum if it weren't for the commercial interests of the port keeping the public out. A few rare pictures of it are here.

In fact commercial interest has struck again, as our previously arranged parking spaces inside the terminal had now been grabbed as storage by [German luxury automobile manufacturer*] meaning we have to fight over the space outside. I'm lucky and get Meg about as close as possible to the door outside in the inclement weather. Inside the long shed the first 100 yards is a parking and drop-off area, bedecked with Union flags and about 100 new saloons and coupés, still without registrations and with protective plastic and factory tracking numbers attached.  There must have been close to a million pounds' worth of middle-management tailgating equipment in there.  No time to gawp, as we now have to locate a means of getting up to the departure lounge on the second floor. After fruitlessly trying to find stairs I eventually opt for walking up a static escalator.  My first impression of the concert room is that it's not particularly inspiring. It's basically an airport lounge but with comfier chairs and a lack of marked-up shops. There's a marginal attempt to acknowledge the heritage of the site with reproduction posters of the White Star and Cunard liners, and models of the QE2 and Queen Mary, but this is very much a place that exists for waiting in to go somewhere better. Unlike at the time of the Titanic, or even fifty years later, there's little attempt to dazzle the passengers with luxury from the moment they arrive. It's symbolic of the fact that nowadays, as with flight, cruising and ship travel is a practical rather than a prestige-minded industry.  Expense definitely gets spared in the current climate.

Still, there's a semicircle of chairs for the orchestra and risers for the choir, and the lounge seats have been arranged in quite a lot of rows for an audience of considerable number (we sold out a month ago) so it at least looks like a concert venue. There are some windows on the far side overlooking the water but not much of a view apart from some cranes and the Hythe pier, and the rain hammering away outside and the white of the waves breaking. Incredibly there are more cars parked outside on the quayside, so if you're thinking of buying one bear in mind that it might have been left exposed to the elements on a Southampton dockside for an indefinite period of time. Presently the majority of the orchestra and choir arrive and we begin the rehearsal with Depart...to depart, a new piece which has been specially written for the occasion and will receive its première tomorrow night. The first issue was to turn off the noisy heating system, which took some minutes, in the process of which the fire alarm was set off, quickly being joined in rhythm by the percussion section. About half the choir started to get out quick and had to be called back whilst the rest and the orchestra just laughed and waited for it to be silenced - we were clearly not 'slightly on fire'. 'This is all part of the general 'danger' theme of the concert...' remarked the composer of the first item.  I can't really comment much on what went on for the rest of the evening, suffice to say that we rehearsed the new piece (which I like) for a bit and then moved on the the Sea Symphony (which I liked even more). We had the soloists here tonight, so the plan was basically to run the whole thing and only stop if necessary. The additional noises of the rain, seagulls and particularly the wind whistling through the roof made for a rather atmospheric performance. Out in the gloom ships would roll past the windows, constellations of lights rising and falling together.  I have to say I got more than a flavour of what it must have been like to sail on the Titanic through the dark of the North Atlantic.

Tuesday night was completely different - sunny, a little damp from previous precipitation but bright and the sea calm.  I parked up at about 5.30 at the foot of the grain silos with the rest of the orchestra, and got a few pictures in before anybody security-looking might have seen me and made a fuss.  There was a truly enormous car carrier moored at the other side of the dock, ramp up and ready to depart.

Rehearsal was necessarily brief, as the audience were starting to queue up outside. A female reporter and her cameraman burdened with equipment stayed for a bit to film the orchestra and choir for the evening news.  They got two takes of the opening of A Sea Symphony, which not only gave a flavour of the concert but provided an excellent of shattering the idea that classical music is all quiet.  We top and tail a few bits before there's a tea break. Quick, the punters are coming in.

Practice over, I wolfed down the sandwiches we'd been supplied with for tea and took the cello downstairs, taking great delight in romping the wrong way through the security room unhindered with it. It was time to entertain the crowds with some jolly numbers from the White Star Line Song Book (and Nearer, My God, to Thee).  The 'palm court' was a corner of the room with some trees that almost resembled palms, but not quite well enough.  In fact this hardly mattered as there were plenty of other distractions for the waiting audience; chiefly the bar, but also four giant ship's funnels that had made an appearance at a previous Titanic-related concert; costumed actors and actresses and us palm court musicians ourselves - when the trombonist arrived and we could start, that is.  The conductor gave my arrangements of I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside and The Glow-Worm (no, I didn't think many of you would remember that one) several outings, interspersed with other bits and bobs he'd arranged from the WSLSB, which made the now-arrived trombonist jolly pleased as he could have multiple goes at the duuur-uuur-ur! glissando I'd written.

Thirty minutes later we all run back upstairs to do the rest of the concert.  It's a full house: we sold out a month in advance.  Our conductor, John, enters the podium and allows Ian to introduce his piece Depart...to depart, with an explanation of all the different songs from the different classes of the ship he's based the piece around, as well as the sounds of the Titanic's whistle and machinery and other parts of the ship depicted in the music.  I rather like it actually, and we give a good account of the dots for ten minutes or so.  After the applause there's some faff time whilst the choir come on, which a chunk of the audience take as a cue to re-visit the bar.  We also put some jobsworth carrying buckets past the stage in his place so he doesn't disturb the rest of proceedings.  One settled down again, there's a dedication-cum-prayer by the Dean of Southampton remembering those on the ship and all who work in the port (this goes on a bit).  Then Mark Oldfield and Jane Streeton, who are our vocal soloists, enter to more applause.  Now for the main event - once the seagulls on the roof have shut up.

John is on the podium.  The brass and horn sections all have instruments poised ready for the downbeat...

BAAAAAAAAA!!! BA-BA-BA BAAAAAAAAA! BAAAAAAAA!!!!!!
'BE-HOLLLLLD.......the...SEAAAAA!!!!' CRASH!!!!

And so begins surely one of the best openings to any symphony ever written, let alone somebody's First. The general aim of this is to knock people clean out of their seats with the volume and splendour of it all, in much the same way as the Verdi we did on tour. After all the luscious strings and blowing brass the piece moves on to a faster bit, then the baritone enters, then...well, space does not permit a blow-by-blow account of the whole piece, you'll just have to listen to it all.  There are two - three, in fact - very good reasons for choosing to perform this other than the above; first, it's British and sea-related; second it was composed at around the same time as the Titanic was built; and thirdly, the Walt Whitman poem Vaughan Williams sets in the first movement includes the most apt lines for this week of commemorative events:

'Token of all brave captains
And of all intrepid sailors and mates
And of all who went down doing their duty'

The last movement the symphony is Mahler-length, nearly half an hour, and deals with the ongoing quest of geographical and metaphysical exploration. Its opening is vast and cosmic, the first bit of sustained reflective calm in the whole symphony, later more exotic and questing as the text demands.  In places it's almost like high-quality epic film music, at others one can hear clearly how much of a French influence the composer picked up (one achingly lovely passage accompanying the solo baritone is scored for muted horns, solo flute, oboe, cor, clarinet and solo violin and viola). The coda is a stroke of genius, with a false ending suddenly restarting as a gradual fade-out on two, then a single chord which is lost in the heights of the choir and the depths of the celli and basses.  Trust a seagull to nearly ruin it...

It was a triumph. The orchestra played superbly; the choir were perfectly tuned and by turns gloriously powerful and magically subtle. Best of all, we have had mountains of messages and emails praising the performance.  I'd like to think that somewhere, far away, the Titanic's band were listening, cheering us on...

* Hint: It's not Mercedes-Benz, Audi, VW or Porsche.

The Solent Way: Part 1

Yes, it's time for another epic/nearly epic ramble across some diverting part of southern England. Specifically, the Solent. Home turf. Mostly almost completely flat.

Introduction: The geography bit

It may be recalled that in the not-very-distant past I navigated the entire length of the River Itchen, a pleasant but otherwise unremarkable chalk stream that, as you may recall, wends its way from the hills a bit to the left of Winchester into the sea at Southampton. That description is broadly accurate apart from the last bit, because how the water from the Itchen ends up in the English Channel is actually a little more complicated than that and is responsible for the existence of the other footpath in the area.  Southampton, you see, is also the dropping-off point for the River Test, and the end of the Itchen Way is actually at the point where the two rivers meet. The combination of the two watercourses and millennia of subsequent erosion to soft rock means that a massive inlet called Southampton Water lies to the south of the city and carries all the river flow out to the English Channel. Adding to the picture is the lozenge-shaped Isle of Wight, which sits right at the bottom of the estuary and creates a complicated pattern of tides up its two sides (one of the reasons Southampton is such a successful port, as it has so much high water). The main landmass of the island is skewed rather to the left (west) so that a large section its northern shore creates a sheltered channel between Calshot and Keyhaven, which is one clue to how all of what we see today formed. The other is the famous series of chalk stacks (and lighthouse) at the very western tip of the island known as The Needles. These line up so remarkably well with a similar band of chalk on the Isle of Purbeck, some miles along the coast, that looking from above it's quite obvious that these were once joined. In fact during the last Ice Age sea levels were much lower and the northern channel described above was once the mouth of a 'River Solent', part of which still exists as the River Frome.  A narrower Southampton Water would have joined this just below where Selsey Bill is today and it would have been easy to walk across a now-vanished area of land from Purbeck to the Isle of Wight. In fact this appears to have been possible (albeit with wet feet) until a few millennia ago, as Roman buildings have been found in the sea near Yarmouth. At the end of the Ice Age, both glacial meltwater and the interesting process of glacial rebound uplift causing the bottom of Britain to sink flooded the river valley and eroded the chalk, creating what we see today.  If this isn't making much sense, here's a (very) not to scale map illustrating the gist of the last paragraph:

So, where are we going to go?

The boundaries of the Solent aren't officially defined; it is generally reckoned to be the mainland shore that roughly corresponds to that of the Isle of Wight.  However, the boundaries of the Solent Way are very specifically designed to meet up with the Bournemouth Coast Path at one end and the Sussex Border Path at the other, meaning the trail can act as one link in the UK section of the E9 Long-Distance Path. This is a massive 5000km series of paths (not all open as of 2012) up the entire northern coast of Europe, from Cabo de São Vicente in Portugal to Narva-Jõesuu in Estonia.  We're going to be taking in the less giddying prospect of a 63-mile journey from Milford-on-Sea to Emsworth, which involves traversing most of the waterside around Southampton Water and a bit on either side facing out into the sea.  Along the way we'll pass the harbour villages of Lymington and Keyhaven, the New Forest, an oil refinery, beaches, military installations, the cities of Southampton and Portsmouth and the mud flats of Langstone.  Plus quite a lot of boats. And some hovercrafts. 

Obviously, the entirely logical thing to do is to start in the middle:

Southampton to Hamble (10 miles)

The Itchen Way does not have a clearly defined end at Woolston. It just sort-of becomes the Solent Way, shrugging that the river has finished and deciding to merge into a coastal walking route. But there's a little bit of it we need to do before we can reach this point, and that's to start at where we will eventually return by ferry from an earlier stage.

The Hythe Ferry will deposit us right into the middle of Southampton, at Town Quay, which used to be a proper working quay with docks and stevedores swearing and smugglers smuggling and men in flat tweed caps rehearsing sentences starting with 'back in maa day...'. After years of use, then several of disuse, in the 1980s it acquired a car park at the end and some swanky new UPVC-clad buildings, including a Beafeater and various offices and bars, although seems not to be particularly lively these days. Still, it's quite handy to have the ferry deposit passengers here, as it means one can get straight back to walking the Solent Way from Hythe, having missed out about 15 miles otherwise needed to get round the mouth of the River Test.


View Larger Map 

Southampton's docks will be more fully covered in a future leg, as on this particular day the main focus of my interest would actually be departing from them and following, albeit several hundreds yards offshore, the route of The Way (makes it sound kinda' mystical, huh?). This was the Queen Elizabeth, Cunard's latest cruise liner (something which instantly dates this trip to quite some time in the past) which would be making its maiden voyage out into the world from the same berth (give or take) as the Titanic did, hopefully with a somewhat lengthier career afterwards.  There's not a particularly good view of the whole ship from anywhere other than the end of Town Quay - walking along Canute Road past the dock gates the view is largely obscured, thanks to Associated British Ports' public-spirited habit of grabbing all the available waterfront land and peppering it with warehouses, cranes and fences. I will concede that the ship was so bonking enormous this didn't matter much unless you were desperate for a view of the black expanse of hull over that of the decks and funnel, but the point remains.

The path crosses Dock Gate Four and then a level crossing, which used to be traversed quite regularly by boat trains and dock shunters (another line branched off and ran along the road to Town Quay, believe it or not) and still sees regular auto trains taking new cars and vans off to the rest of the country.  I have no idea if any car I've ever owned arrived this way, but it would be nice to think so. More interesting is the building opposite, South Western House, for this was once the main terminus station in the town, and a glorious, solid Victorian structure it remains, even retaining the green-strutted roof that once covered the platforms (and is now, with wearying predictability, a car park).  It was a logical place for trains to terminate, of course, as the docks were so close. You can almost still imagine the smell of steam trains, ladies in elegant frocks and barefoot young lads in clogs running after the tram (Street View, although not containing Edwardians).

After some dreary modern apartments the Way suddenly climbs a flight of steps on to the Itchen Bridge. It forms a long and surprisingly elegant curve over the river, given that essentially it represents an essay on the wonders of modular concrete construction.  What preceded it was wonderful in its idiosyncrasy, a 'floating bridge' chain ferry, fondly remembered by older Southampton residents and with its last incarnation still extant as a restaurant on the Hamble River.  It was even painted by L S Lowry in 1956, using his trademark hurrying stick-figure style. By the 1970s this was considered inadequate to carry the levels of motor traffic of the day (particularly buses which had to make the detour upstream to Northam Bridge to cross the river) and so a toll bridge was erected, towering over the river as the highest construction in the city up to that point. The city council have kept rather quiet about the exact date at which the tolls collected were equal to the cost of the bridge, finding it more convenient just to carry on charging for the privilege of driving from the City to Woolston. I, however, could cross completely free on foot, which had the added bonus of a good view of the Queen Elizabeth still being readied to set sail. There is a rather dense concentration of Samaritans phone numbers up here, complimenting the alarmingly minimalist guard rails. It's a bit windy too, and it has been known for double-decker buses to be diverted in heavy weather conditions. Uphill one side , downhill the other (Street View, and again).

On the Itchen Bridge

Safely on the other side (suicides and gusts of wind are the least of the potential hazards up there, especially after dark), Woolston (Street View) has retained a rather industrial character even with the removal of the Vosper Thornycroft ship factory at the quayside. There's still - still - an vast and embarrassingly empty plot of prime riverside land up for grabs here, which at one point was in line for an ambitious plan involving glass towers and a multi-faith library (Street View). At present its progress has reached the extent of about thirty houses and a new road. We've covered most of this before in the Itchen Way, so we shall jump ahead a few hundred yards down the road to the point where we turn the corner onto a proper expanse of water again at Weston Shore.  Weston (Street View) isn't a particularly nice area inland, but luckily the tower blocks (scheduled for demolition, and not a moment too soon) are segregated from the shore by some trees and a long expanse of lawn, on which has been erected some quasi-artistic benches. They're a little difficult to describe, but sort of naturally rise out of the turf and contain snatches of poetry or descriptions of birds.  There is a beach of sorts here, although it's shingle and mud, not sand, and the water has an awful lot of marine diesel, seaweed and other nasties in it.  There was a sizeable ribbon of people gathered on the shingle to watch the QE go out, but it wasn't moving yet so I pressed on, past play areas and concrete shelters to where the 'coastal road' goes through some woods although the path stays by the water. At this point there was a noise like a thousand trombones in an echo chamber as the biggest hooter within a fifty-mile radius boomed over the water.

Many of pairs of binoculars and camera lenses turned to fix upon the silhouette of the docks, which unfortunately obscured the ship behind a car park and a pair of giant grain silos. I found a convenient spot at the end of a slipway to the shore, and by this time the Queen Elizabeth had rounded the bottom of the docks and was providing an unexpected photo opportunity for commuters on the Isle of Wight ferry. The huge ship slowly processed down the Solent accompanied by yachts and small boats until twenty minutes later it had become a small silhouette rounding the Isle of Wight. I have to conclude that it was somewhat less elegant than its namesake of old, rather more in the 'floating block of flats' style utilised by the majority of modern cruising vessels. I'd moved on by the time it had disappeared.

The next settlement, Netley, is a pleasant village with one main street along the waterside and into the country park at the other end (Street View).  I used to come here a lot as a child, motivated by the possibility of either riding my bike down the slope or, later, breaking numerous bamboo rods in attempting to fly a kite. There's a Victorian church with an octagonal tower standing in the middle of the large lawn, which seems a rather odd entity unless you know what this place used to be (Street View).  It's actually the last remaining part of a huge military hospital which treated patients from the Boer War up to the Second World War, and had its own railway station and cemetery to service this function. The wings were removed in 1966 leaving just the central chapel standing, overlooking the water at the bottom of a slope. I keep meaning to go up the dome but so far have never had a visit coincide with it being open. Ah well, there is still time. 

Having passed through the country park and yacht club, the next bit is rather nondescript shingle with woodland to the left and water to the right.  Across the water is Fawley, a word which, locally, isn't used to signify the town. Instead it describes the far more massive oil refinery and power station that sits on the opposite bank of the Solent and, more controversially, on the edge of the New Forest. Indeed, when we come to walk the section on this side, the complex occupies so much land that the Solent Way doesn't even bother to rejoin the shore after heading inland to cross the Beaulieu River, but cuts across the Forest to Hythe. Piers jut out into the water allowing tankers of various sizes (although not the biggest supertankers, of course) to pump their eye-wateringly valuable cargo into the many storage tanks onshore.  I find it slightly disagreeable that this industrial hinterland exists right next to an outstandingly beautiful area of medieval forest ('New' is relative), but at the same time there was something quite arresting about the equally awesome forest of towers and spires and pipelines and storage tanks, particularly near sunset when all the marker lights and floodlights were on and the massive vapour stack smudged into a clear sky. Is it trite to suggest that this place is a cathedral to our worship of oil, and even majestic in its apocalyptic desolation, full of fire and smoke and metal and black gold?

Insert environmentalist slogan here

Viewed from above (see Google Maps) the storage tanks, with tops in various states of corrosion, appear more than anything like a set of giant paint pots containing shades of red, brown, blue, grey, black, yellow, or green where they have been removed and grass springs up.

Approaching Hamble, there's a much smaller oil terminal on our side of the water, and the Solent Way is shoehorned up a narrow boardwalk underneath a pier, also containing several massive oil pipes.  Up ahead is a white spattering like an Impressionist painting, of yachts parked in the river Hamble, and an area of semi-beach with sandy grasses and woods behind. It's through these woods I go to reach the village proper, and emerge out of a narrow lane in the main street (Street View). As this ends at the riverside in a loop the place is literally a dead-end town, although this is hardly appropriate given that the town is really quite moneyed. It's also a place where a large part of the economy revolves around boats.  Down a slope at the marina is the yacht club, where I played a quartet gig whilst a sixth-former, and the pier that form the terminal for the Hamble-Warsash Ferry, which is where I will resume the trail next time.