Southsea Beach is the destination of the troubled drug addict, Ragged Cathy, in a chapter from Jonathan Meades’s Pompey (1993) that describes her journey from her squat to the Esplanade. One of the followers of Ray Butt, former comedian, double amputee, and charismatic founder-leader of the ludicrous Church of the Best Ever Redemption, Cathy is one of many deeply broken people who populate the novel, and in the extract that follows the bleak vision of the city is partly hers and partly Meades’s:

‘She tramps Pompey streets, clutching a gingham spongebag. She tramps the relentless grid, the ranks and ranks of brick houses. She chews her tongue and bites her lips […] She tramps and tramps with chicken feathers glued in her hair for The Founder whom she’ll listen to tonight as she has every night since she arrived at this brick city set on mud which is fowl. The first night she missed was the night of the day when she had followed the sun from her no-toilet, smashed pane, half-roof squat past the ranks and ranks of brick houses with OMO packs in the windows, past the people who were made of mud (she knew where they had come from), past the Halals on their haunches, past corners, street corners, house corners, wall corners, kerb corners, brick corners, past streets of houses that dash to vanish on the distant horizon, past streets indistinguishable from the street at the last corner and the corner before than, past bricks, past streets whose cast-metal sings she bends to stare at from so close that she cannot read the whole name without shifting her neck […]

Dutifully she pursued the sun, south to Southsea Esplanade. She tramped across half past the hour and noon itself on the floral clock. She observed the oscillations of a sprinkler, the temporary animals the jets created, the darkness of the wet grass, the plucked-skin surface of the perpetually disturbed pools of water. She clutched her spongebag which contained important items. She clutched it with both hands to her tummy. At the playground she ignored the prohibition of adults unaccompanied by a child. What is age? She put down the spongebag at the base of the metal frame that supported the swings. She could smell the metal. The concrete was crazed, it wasn’t meant to be, the sun had got to it, done this to it. She licked the metal tubing. The hepatic tingle, the spinach taste, the boundless vitamins in metal […] When she finishes she crosses the road to the sea wall, to the stairs to the beach. Blind to Wight, blind to the black bastion in Spithead, blind to the big ships on the bluegreen that seems higher than the land, blind to it all, she lies and wriggles and rolls and parts the pebbles to form a set. She covers herself in shingle. She lies alive in a self-built barrow. She blends with the beach, with the tarred stones and dessicated kelp. The shore’s the end. The tumulus weighs some. Her breaths are short, curtailed by that weight, by the load on her. The luxury of pulmonic liberty is denied her – that’s good, that’s the ticket, that’s how she wants it’ (1993 ed., pp. 286–7).

Quoted with the kind permission of the author.

Meades informed me that he hardly knew Portsmouth when he started the book, having visited on only two occasions – once, at the age of 12 to see HMS Victory and the forts on Portsdown Hill and once, aged 18, to witness the finished but yet unoccupied monument to Brutalist architecture, the Tricorn Centre. He recalled that the three research visits he made while writing the novel were disappointments because the actual city did not accord with his invention,. As a result, he stuck with his invention in a bleak and vivid portrayal of the city that owes much to Meades’s brilliance as a diagnoser of post-war ills and perhaps a little something to his status as a fan of Southampton FC. Nonetheless, he was impressed by the number of street fights, drunks, and naval problem families he encountered.

Jonathan Meades (b. 21 Jan 1947) is a polymathic writer, broadcaster, architectural critic, amateur chef, and one of the finest minds of his generation. He has authored three works of fiction, several collections, and an autobiography, He has written widely on food and architecture, and created many TV shows, predominately on architectural subjects but always expressing Meades’s political and cultural views in his trademark scabrous style, combining caustic wit, erudition, and social commitment.

Meades was born in Salisbury, and educated at Salisbury Cathedral School. His parents John and Agnes were a sales rep and a primary school teacher. A teenage passion for architecture was prompted by accompanying his father on work trips, and by a school visit to Edwin Lutyens Marsh Court. After a mixed experience of schools, Meades spent one year at the University of Bordeaux before enrolling at RADA. While ultimately deciding against an acting career, Meades' RADA experienceprobably informed his sophisticated broadcasting performances.

Building a journalistic career from the 1970s onwards, Meades worked as an editor, TV critic, food writer, and restaurant critic. Taking the latter role very seriously, he won Best Food Journalist at the Glenfiddich Awards four times between 1986 and 1999. He ultimately gave up the role because of its repetitive nature and effects on his health, but he remains passionate about food, and has been described by Marco Pierre White as ‘the best amateur chef in the world’. Over the years Meades has worked for Architect’s Journal, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, The Observer, The Spectator, Tatler Time Out, The Times, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Meades’s journalistic reputation spurred his wider writing career, leading to the publication of Filthy English (1984) (short stories of dysfunctional English rural life), and the essay anthology, Peter Knows What Dick Likes (1989). His 1993 novel, Pompey has Portsmouth at the centre of a visceral and bleakly hilarious exploration of the ills of post-war civilisation that roams across the globe, taking in Salisbury, Belgium, France, and the Belgian Congo as other important locations. Equally dark, Meades’s second novel, The Fowler Family Business (2002), centres on the funeral industry. His An Encyclopaedia of Myself (2014) won the Best Memoir category at the Spear Book Awards. A sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes, the collection of essays Pedro and Ricky Ride Again will appear in Autumn 2020.

Meades’s substantial and important television career has led to the creation of more than 60 innovative and thought-provoking TV shows. After a 1985 short on Barcelona’s art and architecture for BBC 2’s Saturday Review, he has produced countless major works, from 1987’s The Victorian House (1987) for Channel 4 through to his most-recent show, Mass Tourism: the Architecture of Franco’s Spain (2019). Like the rest of his other work, Meades' TV shows are difficult to categorise but amply demonstrate his conviction that the comic and the serious are productive, if often uneasy bedfellows. Architecture, art, travel, cities, politics, totalitarianism, and food are regular features of his unique gaze. Meades is also an artist and photographer. He is a leading exponent of atheism and a strong supporter of both the National Secular Society and Humanists UK. Since 2011, Meades has lived in Charles-Édouard Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation residential block in Marseille.

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions about the map entries please contact the Map Director Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk