Vantage Point

I needed to make a call today to Hythe Marina, set on Southampton Water and right opposite dock head at the entrance to Southampton Docks.
 
It’s one of several good vantage points for photographers to capture the arrival of P&O’s massive new cruise liner, Britannia, which is to be named by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on Tuesday of next week.  The liner is due to arrive in port on Friday and expected to be off dock head at 12.30pm.
 
But for today there was plenty of atmosphere to capture in photographs of the marina village itself, always a photogenic destination on Southampton’s western waterfront.
 
The Marina Village was conceived by developer John Dean of Dean and Dyball in response to a development brief from the New Forest District Council as long ago as May 1981, and today is still one of the most attractive waterfront marina developments on the South Coast.
 
It comprises 225 houses each with an adjacent berth and a 275-berth yacht marina, together with two restaurants, offices and shops. Guy Pound was commissioned to design the scheme, and construction work began on the lock and the first of three marina basins in 1984.
 
The first house brick was laid by Sir Christopher Cockerell, inventor of the hovercraft and it was in 1985 I had the privilege to be invited to formal opening of the lock by yachtsman Sir Chay Blyth, when TS Royalist and Virgin Atlantic Challenger led a fleet of 150 yachts through the lock.
 
 
Work on the marina village took until 1988 when the last canal was flooded, and that In summer the Marina Village was completed.
Today a five bedroom home in the marina village could command £695,000 or as much as £1.5 million.