Portsdown Hill is a prominent location in Jonathan Meades’s Pompey (1993). It first appears in one of the earlier chapters, during a trip of the Vallender family from their Salisbury home to Portsmouth. After Guy Vallender, his wife ‘the Child Bride’, and son, ‘Poor Eddie’, visit HMS Victory and Portsmouth Naval Memorial, Clarence Esplanade, they follow the ancient custom of taking in the Portsdown Hill viewpoint above the city. A master stylist, Meades’ description offers a rich and dense evocation of the scene:
‘They drove from the flat waterbound city to picnic on the cliff called Portsdown. The roads were steep, steep as Eddie had ever seen, grew steeper still. Green trees rose from each other’s upper boughs. Houses sat above their neighbours; roof conjoined roof in a cascade of tiles. Hedges led to the sky. Poor Eddie wondered if this was the way to heaven. The car roared when they got there, relieved. He looked down from heaven onto the model of the city whose name is his story. He saw the blinding water of the harbours, the sails, the cranes, the shiny marshes, the grey boats, the grey birds, the smoke, the streets, the streets of Pompey that go on forever, cross and recross streets that are copies of themselves, streets whose houses have packs of OMO in the front-room window, streets where tattooed tars lick tired tarts and fill them with seven weeks’ stuff, streets where Poor Eddie’s unknown sibling is just now crying for want of a father.
In Pompey all is bright. The sea is a million mirrors reflecting the sun. It’s too much to look on for long. Up on Portsdown, on top of the chalk wall that commands the city and the sea, there stands a rank of fortresses, all unkempt and jungly. Here’s one that rises on the horizon like a thorny crown’ (1993 ed., pp. 106–7).
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.
ENTRY: Dr Mark Frost, Department of English, University of Portsmouth.
If you have any queries, corrections, or suggestions please email: mark.frost@port.ac.uk
ENTRY: Dr Mark Frost, Department of English, University of Portsmouth.
If you have any queries, corrections, or suggestions please email: mark.frost@port.ac.uk