20. Walking Past The Corpses Of Dead Shopping Centres

That Crap Towns book has been trolling Southampton for years, you know. Apparently we're the bumhole of the south of England. Which would make the Isle Of Wight the turd, right? Look, I don't make this stuff up.* As English cities go, Southampton isn't the most exotic of places. One of the most famous ports in the country, we have no seaside - not even the sh*tty pebbly shoreline that Brighton and Portsmouth try to pass off as a beach. The accumulated weight of centuries of history wells up through the cracks of the old medieval walls and the Bargate gatehouse that still squats at the heart of the city centre... but we're not a thriving cultural mecca. There's no chance of us being named European Capital Of Culture like Glasgow and Liverpool - or even the UK City Of Culture (the crappy local version of the European award), like Hull. With two universities, chances are a lot of you reading this came to study: and many of you stayed, because removal vans are expensive and your bar job was clearly more important to you than your degree in the last couple of years anyway. But whether you're a local or a recent transplant, there's a peculiar batch of criticisms that only Southampton residents get to gripe and groan about. *Okay, sometimes I make this stuff up.When I was a kid, the East Street shopping centre was the only one in town. In 1989, the Bargate Shopping Centre opened up only a street away, and two years later the Marlands had the other end of town sewn up. Then, in 2000 West Quay - aka Darth Mall - the mother of all Southampton city centre's shopping Shangri-Las (try saying that seven times fast) was unveiled, smack bang in the pedestrianised bit in the middle near HMV, where all the goths used to hang about. The East Street shopping centre was a ghost town for twenty years before it was demolished, and the Bargate nearby was getting to be just as bad before it closed a couple of years ago. Darth Mall is slowly force-choking them all to death: today, people mostly use the Marlands to walk through town without getting rained on.