Weston Shore, Southampton

When you tell people that you were brought up on the South Coast, people tend to think this involves ice cream, shale and all the windy, stopped-clock delights of the British seaside. Alas, in the case of Southampton they would be wrong. However the city does have one tiny little stretch of beach, and one so strange that it deserves a whole new category of terminal beaches all to itself.
Weston Shore, on the Southwestern edge of the city, before you come to the eerie village of Netley (more of which later) is a mix of Tarkovsky’s Zone, a 1930s beach utopia and a ‘60s brutalist dystopia, lining up in front of Southampton Water’s silty expanse. The first thing you notice is a line of identical towers, aligned one after the other in Alton Estate style, with one even taller one right at the end. Geometric and standardised, these council flats have at their entrances paths what can only be described as a meadow, an area of lushly overgrown vegetation leading to a thin road and a stony beach.
The road is dotted with a series of little 1930s concrete pavilions, as elegantly Modernist as anything built in that decade. A recent regeneration has cleaned them up, but in the process made them even more peculiar: each one now decorated with abstractions connected with the likes of World War Two, the Victorians, and (bizarrely) prehistoric archaeology, which frame the views of the towers and the beach itself.
Which is nothing to write home about: 2km of stones and general waste, but with pockets of undergrowth and further on, woodland. On the beach can be found some Stalker-esque inexplicable industrial waste: a pile of what seems like the fluff left by some moulting animal was lying there when I last visited. From the beach you get a view of port traffic and the occasional yacht going up and down the desolate waters, and a distant view of the vast Fawley oil refinery, its many slender towers complementing the bulkier ones on the beach side. Industry, the remnants of Social Democracy and disused leisure all make it a spot which can feel like an idyllic vision of the end of the world.


