Brutal day out, Southampton edition

Southampton – Saturday 16 November 2024

Another weekend and another Brutal Day Out away day; this time to see the delights of Southampton, a small port city on the coast two hours south of London.

Looking at travel options for this trip created a bit of me grumbling to Eleanor about cost and faff and that I couldn’t believe it was two hours to Southampton from Waterloo which meant leaving home at 7:30 to get there for 11am. She tolerated this for a while before coming up with the suggestion I contact her ex-husband to see if I could stay with him and his partner on the Isle of Wight on the Friday and then take a quick ferry trip across the Solent to Southampton in the morning. This seemed like a very good, if rather leftfield option and after a couple of exchanged messages it was all arranged.

I left work a little early to avoid the worst of the Friday rush hour and was I rewarded with a nice sunset out of the train window. The train terminates at Portsmouth where I caught the ferry for the 22-minute journey to Ryde on the Isle of Wight. It was millpond calm, though even at 5:00pm it was too dark for photos. Autumn.

Andy, Eleanor’s ex, met me off the ferry with the car and took me back to the house he shares with his new partner where we had dinner before slipping out to the pub for a few pints of local ale and loads of music chat. It was a very nice evening.

Sadly, the ferry from Cowes to Southampton doesn’t run at the same regularity as the Tube does from Leytonstone, so I ended up having to get up quite early anyway, but with a beer headache to contend with as well. After a light breakfast Andy drove me to the ferry terminal and I made another smooth journey across the Solent, this time to Southampton.

The brutal day out was OK, my least favourite so far; there were a couple of the usual gang there which was nice, but more newbies and the group dynamic was a bit off. There was one interesting building to photograph, the Wyndham Court housing estate, but I wasn’t feeling it and while I got some OK images there was nothing I was completely wowed by.

Next to Wyndham Court, and over the road from the train station are Greenville and Portcullis House, unlike the Wyndham Court these are office blocks, though mostly empty and I think they were due for demolition at some stage. Portcullis House (I think) is temporarily being used by the British Transport Police and we were told quite clearly that taking photos near their office was to be discouraged. We did as we were told.

We took a general walk around the city centre with our local guide, there were a few other buildings to look at, but none of them were particularly interesting and I got a bored, and then we went for a swift pint in a very busy Wetherspoons before I grabbed a mid-afternoon train back to London.

Hopefully next time will be back to being fun again.