Portsmouth is a barricaded city, an island engirdled by rock and brick. Greying bastions, polished by the waves, are flanked by vertical buttresses: a memorial obelisk inscribed with the names of soldiers lost to war, a church belltower, once brimming with sound to signal invasion or victory.
Across a stretch of water, where a chain was once uncoiled from a capstan to defend the harbour, brutalist tower blocks stare back at the windward sail of the Spinnaker Tower.
PortsMouth is open to all manner of sea traffic, the great hulks of Wightlink ferries pass within firing range of the city’s crenelated walls.
The seas are rising; water reshapes edges, inundates the land. Sandbags are piled outside houses, fields that were once drained return to marshland, the Great Morass reforms on Southsea Common. The new sea wall is the solution, comprised of reinforced concrete and edged with rock armour.
There have always been sea walls, built to control the direction and reach of the tides, or to withstand seaward threats. Revetments made of mud, timber, flint and chalk, now replaced with stone from Purbeck, rock from Norway. The water’s edge is a mineral collage, each accumulation adding another stratum of protection against the encroaching sea. Concrete slabs, textured like honeycomb will soon be colonised by lichen and barnacles, while pebbles on the foreshore, encased in bladderwrack pelts, formed when the land was a tropical sea, are an older layer in this patient stratification.
The retreating tide reveals mudflats, meadows of seagrass. Harbour seals recline on islets exposed at low tide, anglers wade in the shallows, fishing for plastic.
Follow the sea wall along the city’s northern edges, where the Hilsea ramparts once held the line. The battlements are annexed now by vegetation, only a kingfisher guards the waterways. Concrete reflects the drifting clouds, the seawall pristine but for the green, algal sludge at the high watermark.
The coastal margins have pushed back against the sea, islands have vanished. Marshland that was once traversed by shingle paths, wadeways, have melded into solid ground. Apertures in the seawall frame the future, bulldozers haul mud and stone, dredging, draining, infilling, reclaiming. Shifting sands and shingle, rock, cement, chalk, soil. The island city swells beyond its terrestrial footprint and into the shallows of the Solent.