On Location

Not Andromeda House

I've been back in the borough that inspired Severe Discomfort et al, catching up with friends and family.  I've also been wandering around my former home village and the neighbouring city, reminding myself of the atmosphere and architecture as I get further into the first draft of a story with homes and housing very much in the spotlight.

Looks like the Construction Co-op have been at work!

In particular, I needed to refresh my memory of the local ex-Council housing.  Northern estates have different brick colours and house shapes; more brick walls but fewer hedges, garage blocks and owner-occupiers.  It helped to get another look at the type of house where Lyn and Terry muddle through their lives together, with Stu and Linda next door and Susan up the road.  Their crescent of houses isn't a real road, but if it did exist I know exactly where in the borough it would be.  



Who lives in a house like this?



It wouldn't be Netley Abbey, where I grew up, though Netley's housing, past and present, does inspire some of my characters' homes.  Houses like Hilary's fine old Victorian villa - only with the misfortune to stand in less auspicious locations than the prosperous environs of Winchester - have fallen beneath the tracks of JCBs, having decayed through multi-occupancy and low-budget care home use over the decades since they ceased to be sought after by officers from the old military hospital. 

New flats in a variety of shapes have sprung up in their place, many blessed with the fake balconies so detested by Sally Archer (she knows a crap building when she sees one), leaving parts of the village feeling claustrophobic, but a few gems such as the one at the top of this post remain - for now.  Netley's Station Road also has some larger classic 'thirties semis' of the type where Mike, Lorraine and their children reside, though their home isn't sited anywhere near here in its imagined version. 

It's possible, however, that someone will end up in one of these trendy terraces along the 'front of the village' before the end of the current tale.  No spoilers!

I also needed to remind myself of the streets of more modest semis in the suburbs that ring Southampton, as a couple of intrepid first-time buyers are trying to settle in just such a neighbourhood.  Having picked my location based on memory, I was able to note a few new features of the area that will be crucial for a pivotal scene I'll be writing very soon. 


Southampton Semis



In fact one reason (among many) making me feel I should move on from my current cast and location after this story is the rapidly changing face of the area where it is set.  Even since I last checked out the Woolston area for a cameo appearance by Weston Shore in Limited Capability, a vast number of new flats have sprung up on the site of the former Vosper Thornycroft shipbuilders' with yet more under construction.  Both Southampton and Eastleigh have inexplicable new road layouts and strange new buildings in prime locations, new industries and new communities since I last worked there.  Unless I decided to travel back in time and meet the cast at an earlier stage in their lives, I fear their world and mine are drawing further apart.

If it feels as if it's time to move north for locations and characters, there's no shortage of material.  Daphne has a backstory and two notebooks of draft adventures for a start.  Alternatively, having read and thoroughly enjoyed Hilary Mantel's short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher in the Guardian last weekend, the field of alternative history beckons.  Perhaps we might go back to 2002 and watch as a broken old television set falls from the third storey window of an Easterhouse tenement onto the balding pate of a failed Tory Party leader...?

I need a Tardis - right now!