The following extract from Jonathan Meades’s Pompey (1993) is a particularly pertinent example of Meades’s approach to writing about the city. 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. The following extract is set in Baffins, but the details (the tower block, the general state of the area) do not match the named location, which is characterised by terraced and semi-detached houses. Ray Butt, former comedian and now the charismatic leader of the Church of the Best Ever Redemption, travels with his sons (the ‘voys’, Sonny, Laddy, and Jonjon) to Tangiers Road to collect a pig, which they then drop 180 feet off the balcony of a flat in Bernard de Gomme Tower in order to test Ray’s theory that pigs can fly. Butt’s religion claims that fowls are sacred, and that therefore ‘the true eucharist is celebrated with the flesh of fowl, its blood, its egg’ and that ‘the ingestion of the flesh of wingless creatures […] is a denial of unity, a deprecation of the integer, a spit in God’s face – for the consumption of a beast is a celebration of that beast, and of its species: and it is blasphemy to celebrate those species which have failed’ (1993 ed, p. 273). Unfortunately this doctrine, formed in the wake of Ray Butt’s spiritual epiphany on Portsdown Hill, runs into Ray’s predilection for ‘thick-cut, breadcrumbed ham between two wedges of heavily buttered bread with a smear of Colman’s […] and blue tattooed rashers crisping and curling and emitting their perfume (green or smoked)’ (p. 276) – hence Ray’s decision to test the aeronautical abilities of an unfortunate pig. The Butts meet the pig farmer:

‘on the corner of [Tangier Road and] Algiers Road where the wind whirls and eddies. Abandoned plastic bags zip through the air like predatory seabirds. Predatory seabirds swoop on marge wrappers. A ruff of foil round a gull’s neck is commonplace. The wind whirls and eddies, the wind is bent and concentrated by the tall blocks, the towering dystopias, the vertical slums, the back streets in the sky, the affronts to God (they’re not bungalows), the exhortations to suicide – which is not a sin of despair but of presumption, of presuming to usurp God’s calling the terminal shot’ (pp. 276–7).

Quoted with the kind permission of the author.

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