Postcards, common and uncommon

Stephanie Jones, 26/11/21 [https://www.southampton.ac.uk/english/about/staff/sj4.page]

There are two beginnings to my emerging interest in photographic postcards of Southampton’s Common. The first is personal: I have lived by The Common for over a decade and walk through it most days. It is part of my everyday sense of being in place. The second is an academic interest in cultural, environmental, and legal debates about ‘commons’, and particularly about waterways—both fresh and salt—as shared geographies that are both worryingly vulnerable to overuse and wonderfully resistant to individual proprietorship. Southampton’s Common has a long history as an unenclosed space of remarkable biodiversity and diverse—including exploitative and violent—human usage. It is both an intriguing and disturbing location for considering the ‘commons’ as a way of making knowledge about place.

In looking through postcards of The Common, I am struck by how these cultural objects brings ways of being and ways of knowing together; a juncture that is amplified through the effect that Roland Barthes refers to as ‘punctum’ in La Chambre Claire (1980); Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Classics, 1981). Barthes uses this word to capture the emotional prick—the bruise of poignancy—that is prompted by an incidental or accidental aspect of a photograph as it strikes the spectator. The two examples below indicate the potential of historic postcards of Southampton’s Common—many of which are gathered together in the Peter Cook collection—to enrich our understanding of the connections between our feelings for a place and how we make knowledge about a place.

Peter Cook Collection (PC2120). ‘The Children’s Paddling Pool, The Common, Southampton’.  

This unsent ‘Valentine’s’ brand postcard produced in the 1930s pictures an everyday summer scene; but the generic composition frames a specific material moment. I’m struck by how many of the children have the hems of their dresses tightly balled into both fists, copying one another to keep their clothes dry; and by how this bunched material contrasts the smooth pencil skirt of the adult figure, just right of centre. Her authoritative stance in relation to the boy (and his in relation to her) is exaggerated by the blurring of arm and face, indicating animated conversation. Behind her, it is easy to imagine one toddler has just tumbled—accidentally? deliberately?—another small child into the shallow water; which in turn becomes an invitation to imagine a wailing moment just after the picture was taken, bringing to mind the broader sound-scape of excited children. It is an evocative picture; but it is not one that would become a postcard today, which prompts me to wonder about the photographer, how the image was selected for production, how many of these cards were sent, to whom, and where; and how these journeys expand the connections to a watery-commons evoked by the card.

Peter Cook Collection (PC2122). ‘Cemetery Lake on Southampton Common’.

This is both a more intimate and expansive scene of a watery-commons, and of conversation and play. The patterns and fitted bodices of the sleeveless dresses; the crimped edges of the card; the age or perhaps original overexposure that has turned the sunny-day-sky a grimy colour; the shape of vans in the distance: all these details evoke the 1950s/60s. This is a picture of a different era, but one not so distant that we can’t imagine the children today as adults and their mothers still visiting the common to chat on a bench.  But this isn’t a scene that only speaks to local lives: the absence of trees in an area now wooded, and the presence of children in water now not for swimming conjures the going and coming—the depletion and rejuvenation— of nature within urban common areas against a more inexorable, one-directional national and global story of the destruction of our commons as a multi-species habitat.