Both JB Priestley and Andrew Cross start their English Journeys with the sentence 'I will begin, I said, where a man might well first land, at Southampton'. I always begin with Southampton. I haven't lived there as an adult, bar a few depressive months in 2005 – but I was born there, grew up there, I go back there several times a year, and everywhere else is always, for me, filtered through this strange, chaotic little city, with its mix of ruthless ultra-modernist spaces overlaid atop extensive medieval remnants, with a bland and green suburban expansiveness stretching around it for miles and miles until eventually you find yourself somewhere else (i.e, Portsmouth, with which it is effectively contiguous). I always want to make a place out of it, to see it as somewhere with 'identity' and 'character' and 'personality', but that isn't the role it has been allotted in British capitalism. Southampton has been destined, ever since the South Western Railway exploited its double tides to build a vast port here in the late 19th century, to be somewhere goods (and sometimes, people) pass through en route to somewhere else. Andrew Cross's 2004 'Journey' takes this further than any other project, by showing you what a shipping container would see on its way along the A34 from Southampton to Manchester – a journey where you almost don't see a single human being on the way, but where almost everything you see is man-made.

Cross's English Journey began in every respect in Southampton, and made its way up through the country along much the same route, stopping in galleries at Rugby and Manchester on the way. Its first showing was at the John Hansard Gallery, which was then in a Miesian pavilion in the lush suburban campus of Southampton University, designed in the early 1960s by Basil Spence. It made perfect sense in that location, in such a classic 'there's no there there' landscape. It was also perfect for a gallery which, in great contrast to the Kenneth Clark-assembled collection of humanist painting in the centrally located City Art Gallery, usually showcased rather forbidding, conceptual work. The film, 3 hours from here: an English Journey, looped in one room, an at first shockingly banal sequence of shipping containers, asphalt lines, signs, lorries and distribution sheds, with large-format photographs of the same landscape. A book featured juxtapositions of quotes from Priestley in 1933 and ultra-alienated images of his route in 2004, and an essay from the other end of the journey, by the Mancunian Marxist geographer Doreen Massey (who died, too young, in 2016).

Massey contrasted her memories of the A34 with the placelessness of air travel, which was in the 2000s becoming basically a method of commuting across Europe or even within the UK, or the hated Virgin Trains - since rebranded under a new franchise, but just as horrible an experience. In air travel, 'aside from the cheapness (to you individually that is; the wider environmental damage is not accounted in the fare) the insistence on speed is the denial that the travelling itself can be part of the pleasure, part of the holiday'. Astonishingly, Virgin treated train travel, far less environmentally destructive and far more pleasant, in exactly the same way. 'Apart from the general feeling of being packed into some kind of storage tube, the emphasis is on what you can do within the train, rather than on any engagement with the world you will travel through. There's a socket for your laptop but you'll be lucky to get a decent view through a window. The internal world of the travelling capsule'. The achievement of Cross's English Journey was not so much to show you the pleasure of travelling through an older, un-alienated England, but to force you to look at the landscape that actually exists, a space of logistics, containerisation, distribution, which was at the time almost systematically ignored.

Virgin Trains were one of the symbols of that era. Although they ply the routes from London to, respectively, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow, I always felt there was something very post-1996 Mancunia about them, with the Madchester colour scheme, the banterishness that extended to talking toilets, and the general sense that it was all a big confidence trick. If Southampton is a city that consistently punches below its weight culturally, the other end of the A34 is the opposite, a proud, urban and urbane metropolis, or at least that's how it has come to think of itself. Since the '90s it has been very clearly England's real second city, the most culturally and politically important place outside of the capital and the south-east, basing its rise on the reflected glory of its crucial role in punk and rave, turned into a still-ongoing property boom via mill and warehouse conversions and skyscraping luxury flats. It was the New Labour city par excellence. 

Southampton was the opposite in every respect, a place where the suburbanising 1980s never really ended, and where, unlike in Manchester, working industry and working infrastructure still defined the landscape. The city centre is overlooked at all times by incredibly tall, semi-automated cranes and a multicoloured grid of containers, which, for the most part, nobody acknowledges, nobody talks about, and relatively few people work in (the dock labour force was decimated by containerisation, and sailors on the container ships are not allowed to disembark). The John Hansard Gallery has since moved, in the city council's rather belated attempt to conjure an 'Urban Renaissance', into a Cultural Quarter in the city centre. It is on Above Bar, the long wide straight street that so struck JB Priestley on his 1933 journey, that originally ran straight to the Cunard liners (it now runs to the Isle of Wight ferry), but English Journey made much more sense in a campus where you can walk to the M27 – an emphatic vision of Britain as a decentred network of non-spaces, not a collection of historic cities. The work was made during the New Labour years in which, from the mass movement of exiled urbanites' suburban children to inner London and inner Manchester, to the 'regeneration' of docksides from the Avon to the Tyne to the Clyde, the focus of architectural and town planning discourse returned to the city, to a walkable and ‘legible’ urbanism.

Southampton was very late to this party, and built its Cultural Quarter in the late 2010s, with a gallery and a theatre shoved into the spaces above Nando's, Gin & Olive and Grumpy Monkey, in cheap and nasty new buildings. Southampton had until recently a big, beautiful concrete and brick flour mill, built in the 1930s, which was clearly a cousin of the buildings that became such ‘iconic’ New Labour cultural spaces as Baltic in Gateshead or Tate Modern in Southwark. You can see the Solent Flour Mill prominently in Cross's photographs, and in the first few minutes of 3 hours from here. A local campaign to save it was ignored by Associated British Ports – privatised in 1981 and now a consortium owned jointly by a Canadian pension fund and the Kuwait Investment Authority – and demolition began in 2021, to make way for more containers.

This is a suburban city, or rather, a node in a suburban megacity. According to ESPON statistics, it is the eighth largest metropolitan area in the country. With over 1.5 million inhabitants, it is larger than more obvious centres like the conurbations around Bristol or Nottingham, and with many more people living in it than in Greater Glasgow or Greater Belfast; it is in fact, if not in legislation, one of the largest settlements in Europe. As the Fareham-raised geographer Nicholas Phelps convincingly argues in his remarkable book Anatomy of Sprawl, the Japanese Metabolist-style Southampton-Portsmouth 'Solent City' imagined by progressive planners in the sixties was effectively built in the seventies and eighties, by volume housebuilders and retail park developers, in order to serve new employers such as IBM and BAE Systems. All of it was built in such a way that you never really know it's there. As many people live in ‘Eastleigh’ and ‘Fareham’ as in Southampton and Portsmouth now, with their original railway town or market town cores dwarfed by a low-density zone of giant Asdas and Barratt Homes. This process upended the balance of both cities, as the ‘declining’ old centres of Portsmouth and especially Southampton turned their historic and post-war modernist spaces inside out to create megamalls to attract custom from the affluent sprawl around.

It's this landscape you see for the first 20 minutes or so of Cross's film, and it fades almost without changing into the countryside, and then the infrastructural nodes of the Midlands. The centrepiece of An English Journey (3 Hours From Here) is the giant, gleaming white cubes of the distribution sheds in the middle of the country, which, again, were spaces that were resolutely un-discussed in the belief that the centre of economic gravity was shifting towards the centres of big, easily definable cities. Those cities were stocked to the brim with goods, and yet none of them made anything anymore. You could read the label and know that an item in question came from China or Bangladesh, but you wouldn't know how it came to your branch of John Lewis. Cross shows you how. It would arrive in a container taken from a ship in Southampton (or Felixstowe, or Teesport, or Portishead), it would be lifted by crane onto a freight train or more often a lorry, it would go down the motorway to a big, featureless shed with no indications on the outside as to what it actually did, it would be filed and packed and ready to be taken to your familiar retailer, where you would find it on the shelf. The rest is out of sight and out of mind.

Looking at this landscape in 2022, it is striking how much these indefinable places that nobody thought about – unless they were among the small, casualised workforce of port or logistics park – have taken on a political reality. Maybe an early sign of this was in the way that utopian communist intellectuals circa 2010 in California or Greater London would dream of mass strikes in the container ports stopping the inexorable automated processes of 'just-in-time' capitalism – read something like Mark Fisher's 2009 blog post 'Anticapital after Containerisation' for a blast of that. We know a lot more about some of these spaces now, mainly because of the spectacularly brutal late neoliberalism of Amazon, with its harshly policed distribution centres and systems which are fully automated everywhere but in those places where people are cheaper than robots. Some have dreamed of transforming these logistics nodes into the distribution networks of a new cybernetic socialism (Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski's People's Republic of Walmart is the most complete statement of this position), but there has also been a lot of long-overdue attention to the appalling conditions of these places – seen in the US in various fires in recent years, followed by a warehouse roof collapsing outside St Louis last December, which killed six people – and attempts by workers there to unionise.

What nobody could have predicted in the 2000s, however, was the fact that the main party of capital in Britain managed to sabotage its own networks. This meant that suddenly, in 2020 and 2021, people were thinking about distribution and logistics, because they could see what happened if a small spanner was put in the works. From the great toilet paper shortage of spring 2020 to the long queues of lorries in Kent the same year, from to those weeks in 2021 in which large sections of supermarket shelves lay empty to the fuel shortages throughout that summer and autumn, we've had a tiny little taster of what happens when those apparently invisible – but in reality, as Andrew Cross shows, entirely tangible – systems start to break down. If someone were to retrace his retracing of Priestley in a few decades time, it's hard to imagine that the boast of those Midlands distribution sheds that they were only three hours from everywhere would still stand, as the bland and apparently perfect network of containers, sheds and lorries flows seamlessly around them. Just-in-time was never going to last forever.

–––

Owen Hatherley is the author of many books, most recently Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Verso, 2021), a collection of essays written between 2005 and 2020. He is the culture editor of Tribune.