River Itchen – I Walk Alone

More Change – the demise of the gasworks

My walk over the bridge at Mount Pleasant on 1 February got me thinking about the old gasworks. I’d seen the gasometer from my rickety perch on the footbridge and wondered how much longer the familiar landmark would be around. For years, there’d been rumblings about the gasometers being demolished since Southern Gas Networks no longer use them and maintaining them is costly. I wrote about them and took several photos on a walk back in 2017. In 2022, when they announced they really were going, local residents had mixed feelings about their demise. Some saw them as an eyesore, others a piece of history. Personally, I sat somewhere in between. I knew the demolition work had started, so on 7 February, I thought I’d have a closer look while there was still a chance.

The cycle of change

The Mount Pleasant footbridge featured in my first novel, Plagued, and I often cross it on my walks. Despite recent makeshift repairs, it has become alarmingly rickety of late, so it was no great surprise to learn it was due to be replaced. Precisely what this entailed wasn’t clear, but I’d heard work would begin in February and involved closing the road. So, on 1 February, I went for one last look before it was too late.

Where is my bench?

Friday 13 January may not have been the most auspicious of dates for my inaugural 2023 walk, but it was the first non-stormy day that I felt well enough to risk venturing further than the local shops. It was still cold and windy, so I planned a route that gave me plenty of chances to cut things short if the weather turned nasty or my post-Covid tiredness got the better of me. I began with a slow stroll along the cut way beside the old St Mary’s College playing fields. I wanted to see if building work had started on the site since the College closed.

Two bridges and a boardwalk

This weekend I was having a spring clean of my blog and spotted a post I wrote back in September 2019, but somehow, never got round to posting. It was the story of one of my Clarendon Marathon training walks with Kim. Why I didn’t post it is a mystery, but, waste not want not, I’m posting it now, three years late.

Twenty-two, seventy-six and a ninety-nine

We Brits are famous for talking about the weather. It’s true, we do. There’s a good reason for this obsession. Although our little island rarely experiences the extreme weather other places have to contend with, ours is far from consistent. There are no guaranteed warm, dry summers, winter doesn’t necessarily mean snow, rain is always around the corner and it’s quite normal to get all four seasons in one day. When extremes do happen, we’re really not geared up for it. Our houses don’t have air conditioning and there are no snow ploughs or chains for car tyres. The last week has been a tad on the warm side. In fact, the Met Office recorded a record UK temperature of 40.3°C on 19 July. The media gleefully catastrophised. There were headlines like ‘How the heatwave broke Britain,’ and ‘Gates of Hell are opening.’ If it hadn’t been so warm, the men with sandwich boards would surely have been walking up and down, proclaiming that the end of the word was nigh. When people began saying it was far worse than the famous summer of 1976, eye-rolling in our house reached danger levels.

Mostly boats and a ghost

On 19 January 2022, I had been writing about boats and boatyards, so I had boats on my mind. I’d also been thinking about the maritime history of my city. In the days when I travelled the world, whenever I mentioned my home town, people would smile and talk about cruise ships and containers. In Malta, I was told, ‘Everything we have here comes on a ship from Southampton.’ Although I’ve never been a sailor or taken a cruise, I have lived with the sound of seagulls and foghorns all my life, and I can’t imagine not having the sea on my doorstep.

The end of an era

Back in January 2014, I wrote a post about a famous Southampton landmark. It wasn’t the Bargate, the medieval walls, the Civic Centre, or any of the usual monuments; it was a giant boat in a humble garden in Midanbury. To be honest, it was more of an analogy than a history, a cautionary tale about things getting out of control and ignoring the elephant in the room — or the boat in the garden. Sadly, Peter Bromley, the man who built this unintentional folly, has now passed away, aged 93, and, this week, the boat was finally dismantled. Avon Road will never be the same.

Homeward bound

Thanks to the blue bin lorry driver’s rather rude and distracting interruption, I never did get round to the final instalment of my epic foggy walk on 11 January. To be honest, I toyed with the idea of leaving it as it was, with me walking through the beautiful misty parks and chatting with the park keeper. The trouble was, I had some wonderfully atmospheric photos I didn’t want to waste, and the area set the scene in both Plagued and Land Fit For Heroes. That area was Northam, and it is well worth a look around.

Misty St Denys morning

A cold, damp blanket of fog hung over Southampton on 11 January. As I crossed Cobden Bridge, I heard the haunting sound of distant fog horns and watched a lone gull circling. It felt as if he and I were alone on the river. Of course, we were far from alone, but walking in the fog imparts a feeling of splendid isolation. The water hanging in the air muffles the hum of traffic, and fellow travellers appear, like spectres out of the gloom, then disappear again as soon as they’ve passed. I’d planned to walk along the river, but the lack of visibility made me change my mind. Instead, I thought I might check out a few locations from my work in progress. St Denys was a key feature, so I walked across the bridge.

Mount Pleasant

The next stop on my 11 April walk was Mount Pleasant, the area tucked away between Bevois Valley and Northam. It’s so tiny, more or less just one road and an industrial estate, that the name doesn’t even appear on the map. Nice as it sounds, the name Mount Pleasant usually has ironic origins and Mount Pleasant in Southampton is no exception. At risk of offending the locals, it is about as far as it’s possible to get from a mount — being at sea level right on the edge of the River Itchen — and it isn’t exactly pleasant either. In fact it’s right on the edge of Southampton’s most notorious red light district. Having said that, the little terraced houses are lovely and the area has a very interesting history. This was what I’d come to explore.

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