EXPANSION AND DECLINE..

To Southampton today to take my granddaughter to the University where she had to attend a lecture.   Whilst she was there, I took time once again to revisit my old boyhood village of Hythe on the western shore of Southampton Water.    Now the map extract above is clearly very old, but it does show Hythe when it was a real village with its High Street, its shops, post office, school, hotel and its famous pier from which the ferry plies its way to and from Southampton Town Quay.

And that`s how I remember Hythe when, as a boy over 60 years ago, I attended the village school and enjoyed the freedom of exploring the shoreline and the New Forest.   It was still a village then - my old school friend, the acclaimed and much missed poet William Scammell, calling it his `village by the sea.`   They were times when us boys held the village bobby in awe and with respect, we  knew the boundaries not only of the village but also of behaviour;  it seemed instilled in us and we accepted it as natural - just the way things were - and never imagined for one moment that the  restrictions of our formative years were anything to complain about, even if we were conscious of them to begin with.

But in my repeated visits over more recent years I have witnessed perhaps too many changes in my spiritual home.   For one thing, although Hythe retains the core of its now pedestrianised High Street, it`s a village no more, as expansion into new housing developments skirting the edge of the Forest has turned Hythe into something of a dormitory suburb of Southampton - and it seems to have lost much of its soul in the process.

The High Street itself, once bustling with just enough businesses to sustain themselves, seems in contrast to be in decline, as borne witness by the number of empty shops and the feeling almost of shabbiness that admittedly was not helped by the grey, gloomy January day.    All of which made for a depressing feeling that the decline I witnessed seems somehow in direct proportion to the expansion in size of my village by the sea.   It may be nothing unusual these days, for nothing is forever and, after all, the only constant thing in life is change.

I just wish some of those changes were for the better.