|
The south of
England is essentially an agricultural area. Its largest towns -Portsmouth, Southampton, Bournemouth, Swindon
and Reading - have little of the sympathy with the rest of the area that, for
instance, Bristol has with the West, Nottingham or Leicester with the Midlands, Norwich with
East Anglia or Leeds with the
West Riding. In fact, these towns - now becoming centres of such large
built-up areas as to have lost much even of
their own original identity - are, to
varying extents, artificial growths. Portsmouth is
less a Hampshire city than a naval centre, peopled, at its active core, by sailors from all over the
country who have no roots there. The Aldershot-Farnborough district is equally
services
territory. Southampton is the liner base created a little more than a century ago
out of
the fact that an early railway happened to link London with an anchorage which
had the freak advantage of four high tides a day. Swindon was arbitrarily
selected to become a railway workshop centre, while Bournemouth is simply a
cosmopolitan seaside resort
which might be anywhere where sand, sea and pine
trees occur together. (In contrast, its
neighbour, Poole, is an
integral part of the area.) Reading
represents the attempt to introduce industry into an agricultural district. Unlike every other place on the
banks of the Thames, it seems quite oddly uninvolved with the
river: the visitor to the town may easily be more aware of the Kennet than of
the Thames.There is far more of the quality of
these counties in the country towns such as Salisbury, Dorchester, Winchester,
Christchurch, Abingdon, Newbury, Marl-borough, Lymington, Devizes, Sherborne, Wareham
or Blandford: or in many smaller towns, like Beaminster, Wickham, Wantage, Alresford, Botley,
Wootton Bassett, Romsey, Bridport or Lyme
Regis: and in countless villages, some of them miraculously, if only temporarily, preserved,
which still hold the simple truth of the social form which grew up around
church, manor house, vicarage, manor and church farms, and the village green.This
is, too, a region of great houses, with their steadily changing
significance. Some have become schools or hostels: others still
exert a feudally dominant influence over a district. Nowadays,
too, some are commercial "stately homes" attracting tourists in
such numbers as to create a fresh country industry.
|
