Waterside living...

I spent a few hours at Port Solent, a new(ish) marina near Portsmouth. It seems to have all the right ingredients: boats, fancy waterside apartments, and ‘the Boardwalk’, which turns out to be an uninspiring collection of retailers and restaurants. Maybe the architects wanted to recreate a San Francisco vibe, a ‘Fisherman’s Wharf’ scenario. But the whole is less than the sum of the parts, and this pale pastiche was almost deserted. The boats sat at their moorings, a few people congregated in Wetherspoons, and less than a dozen people (including me) saw Boyhood at the nearby cinema…