50.9097°N / 1.4043°W · United Kingdom
A sheltered channel with deep water, and a tide that behaves unlike anywhere else on this coast. It is the reason for everything else, and the one thing this print cannot show you.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
At the tip of the point sits the oldest part of the town, facing the water. Along both banks, cut into ground taken from the mud, lie the rectangular basins of the docks, and they are the most deliberate shapes on the sheet: every other edge here is a curve. Northward, building runs on without a break to the next town. Across the water to the south-west, the far shore is another matter entirely: hardly a street on it.
That far shore is the contrast the map is built on, but it works through emptiness rather than colour. The woodland there takes only a faint grey, barely apart from the white of open ground, so what you actually read is a quadrilled port facing a bank with almost nothing drawn on it. Elsewhere the losses are the usual ones: the medieval walls, which are among the best preserved in England and will not appear at all; the railway that runs at the foot of the liners; and the tidal mud of both rivers, so they will look full at any hour.
Water everywhere, and in two tempers: the long soft channel running off the sheet, and the hard rectangles of the docks along its banks. That gives one colour two jobs, and it works. What will not work is expecting the far shore to answer with green, because it barely takes a tint. Read that side as empty rather than wooded, and set your ink so the basins keep their edges: they are the only right angles on a page of curves.
Portrait, channel running out at the foot and the point at the centre. The setting favours the basins: pull back and the far shore comes in whole, but the docks shrink to marks, and the docks are the port. The chosen frame keeps them legible and lets the opposite bank sit at the corner.
The title, one line under it, the coordinates. The name of a dock, a sailing year, the hour of a second high water: that last one is worth more than the others, because it is the only thing here that no drawing can hold.
The first ships entered the Outer Dock on 29 August 1842, and it opened to traffic on 1 July 1843. Others followed through the century and into the next, each one larger than the last. Every rectangle you can see was ground before it was water, which is why they sit at odds with a coastline made entirely of curves.
An island sitting across the entrance of this channel acts as a breakwater and doubles the high tide, giving four periods of high water in twenty-four hours. It is the reason ships of any size could come and go here almost at will, and therefore the reason the docks were dug at all. Nothing on a map can draw a tide: this belongs on the caption, and it is the best line this print can carry.
In 1907 the White Star Line moved its transatlantic expresses from Liverpool to Southampton, and a dock was built for them that would later take a bigger name. It is from this port that the Titanic sailed in April 1912. The slipways and quays are still in the drawing; the ships that made them necessary are not.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The gate you walked through without looking up, the quay where something enormous was tied, the far bank on a clear evening. The channel is the same for everyone. What you watched leave from it is not.
Compose my Southampton print
