Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

      In Southampton, meanwhile, questions of taste were paramount, the barometer by which its fortunes could rise or fall. The island’s waters still beckoned, but now the age of the spa had been superseded – in royal and aristocratic fashionability – by the age of the yacht, and attention had moved down Southampton Water to the Isle of Wight and Cowes, and eventually to Osborne, where Victoria would set up her holiday home. The ‘gentry of the first rank and fashion’ – that fickle bunch – were now only passing through the town en route for the island, hardly long enough for its tradespeople to make a profit, or its destitute to chuck a brick. By 1817 the Spa Gardens were virtually deserted, and by 1820 the town’s tonic waters available only in bottles from local chemists. If it were to survive in the modern world, Southampton would have to change again. To this task its intrepid, waterside population proved equal. Once more its waters would rescue it, and within a generation, this geographically-blessed place – with its double high tides and safe harbour yet more accessible in the age of steamships and the railway line that now linked it to London – had entered a new period of success.

      Like the rest of England, everything changed with the coming of the railways. Populations became mobile, and expanding towns were connected by this powerful new web of communication. As a result, Southampton had to cede its role as a ‘retreat for retirement’ to Bournemouth and Brighton, its decline as a seaside resort ironically sealed by the social mobility which elsewhere had made coastal towns accessible, but which in Southampton ran between the beach and the town, separating the citizens from their seaside with its iron rails and belching smoke. To the east, the line ploughed through Chamberlayne’s improved landscape, gouging out its way with high embankments and brick viaducts, seeding the land with new suburbs like fireweed as it went.

      In the process, it too, like Netley, grew a little commoner, as though it had been contaminated down the railway line with a Cockney accent. The Whitehall Review noted that in the town ‘slowly, but surely, has been established the reign of Genteel Vulgarity’ and that in the high street ‘the talking is very loud, the laughter very loud, and the ladies’ dresses for the most part to match. So, too, the garb of the Southampton youth is fearfully and wonderfully made, and he has a way of looking around him which seems to say, “See here – what a dog I am!”.’

      The railway also brought a new class of admirer to Netley. Picnickers now besported themselves in the ruins, as did their metropolitan counterparts at the Crystal Palace, where Paxton’s gigantic greenhouse enclosed ancient elms growing in Hyde Park, just as mature trees grew up in the abbey’s roofless nave. The Great Exhibition celebrated industry, progress and the future; Netley – with its own aspirations to being a crystal palace, its technologically innovative tracery windows having collapsed into decrepitude – represented the past. Gothic itself was turned from its effete, decadent eighteenth-century incarnation into a more rigorous, muscular nineteenth-century aesthetic. To Augustus Pugin, a Catholic convert, the championing of gothic was nothing less than ‘an answer to current social and cultural crises’. From aesthetic spectacle gothic had returned to utilitarian function, although Pugin’s crusade would culminate in suburban villas and terraces, their scaled-down gothic porches appealing to some atavistic sense of the mythic English past. It was a long way from Strawberry Hill’s Committee of Taste, and even further from Abbot Suger’s opus modernum.

      Once more Netley’s ruins would respond to the spirit of the times. Just as gothic changed its meaning, so did the abbey. In 1861, Punch noted that ‘The place has been cleared and cleaned without having been Cockneyfied; it has been furnished with convenient and inconspicuous seats, and rendered permeable throughout.’ At the same time it lamented the fact that when the Lady Chapel had been cleared of ‘rubbish’ and revealed ‘a piece of encaustic tile pavement near the altar … several pieces have been stolen by some robbers who procured admission in the disguise of respectable-looking people’; the magazine called for police patrols of the area. Three years later, William Howitt noted the same reservations which Barham had satirised; the conflicting pressures of popularity and access with art and intellectual demands which the newly-mobile modern world had created:

      The visitors and tourists of to-day are just as much charmed with the ruins of Netley as the monks and Walpole were. They crowd there in summer to picnic amongst the ruined walls and lofty trees, and are not always careful to avoid desecrating these delightful spots with their relics of greasy paper, and of shrimps and sardine boxes. But the grounds are carefully kept, and these unsightly objects daily removed, to be only in fine weather daily left again; a strange desecration that one would think every lover of the picturesque would feel instinctively aware of.

      These were egalitarian times, and romanticism – like the great unwashed – had to be kept in check. The rigours of Victorian technoculture had settled on the world, and fey imagination took a backseat. Howitt noted that ‘Horace Walpole, in his days of gothic enthusiasm, was enchanted with Netley, and seems to have contemplated restoring at least enough of it for a house. What an escape it had of being Strawberry-hilled!’ Sentimentalised on tinted postcards of picnic scenes and the ordinary people at play, Netley had lost its sense of subversion. Accepting their latest role, the abbey ruins gave up their sensational past and slipped back into sleepy indolence.