The Western Docks of Southampton Harbour were built in the 1930s as part of a major expansion of the port’s capacity, designed to handle the increasing size of ocean liners and the growth of cargo traffic. They were operational within a few years of construction, used intensively during the Second World War, and continued as active commercial docks into the 1970s. The decline of the conventional cargo trade and the containerisation of freight, which required very different infrastructure to the general cargo docks, made much of the Western Dock estate redundant within a few decades of its completion.
The dereliction of the Western Docks through the late 1970s and early 1980s was visible and extensive. The dock basins were there, the quayside warehousing was there, the rail connections were there – but the trade had gone. The same pattern was playing out in Liverpool, London and most British port cities during this period as containerisation and the shift of manufacturing overseas transformed the economics of port operation. The question of what to do with derelict industrial waterfront was one that every British port city was facing simultaneously.
The Development
Ocean Village opened progressively from the mid-1980s, developed by a consortium that included Regalian Properties. The model was marina and leisure rather than residential, at least initially: a marina basin converted from the dock, a hotel, a cinema, restaurants, a small retail element and the infrastructure for leisure boating. It was a model that had been tried at places like Salthouse Dock in Liverpool and would later be applied extensively at Canary Wharf in London, though Ocean Village was smaller and more leisure-focused than the commercial development in East London.
The residential element developed over subsequent years as the initial leisure development proved successful in attracting visitors. Apartment blocks on the quayside became the dominant form of the development’s later phases. By the 2000s Ocean Village was primarily a residential area with a marina and a surviving cluster of restaurants and bars around the basin. The cinema closed and was converted. The hotel remained.
What It Replaced
The dock workers who had worked the Western Docks are mostly not the people who live in Ocean Village. This is the standard observation about dockland regeneration in Britain and it is correct about Southampton as it is correct about London or Bristol. The communities that built their working lives around the docks were displaced by the closure of the docks and the regeneration that followed built for a different income group. The geography is the same; the social content is entirely different.
Southampton’s Eastern Docks remain active as a cruise terminal. The container port at the Millbrook and Marchwood terminals handles freight. The port has not disappeared from Southampton’s economy; it has changed form and moved downstream, leaving the old central dock estate for the uses to which Ocean Village has put it. Whether that is the right use is a question that was answered by the planners and developers of the 1980s and is now settled by the presence of several thousand people who live there.
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