I've been reading this book lately and it's absolutely wild https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/An_Anatomy_of_Sprawl.html?id=NlxSSAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

for Southampton and Portsmouth comrades, if you want to know how S-P became a conurbation of over 1 million people despite every single plan ever to do so being rejected, this has all the dirt and it's astonishing

it turns out both Southampton and Portsmouth voted FOR Colin Buchanan's notorious Solent City plan for uniting the two through a Milton Keynes style grid of infrastructure, but it was veto'd by the boroughs inbetween and Hampshire County Council...

...but in the projected growth in population happened and then some. The process by which this happened is fascinating, a planning failure on every conceivable level, creating so the author argues (and in my experience, correctly) the only true US-style sprawl in UK

the issue appears to have been a) the obsession with preserving rural mid-Hants from development at all cost, b) insane local fiefdoms - Fareham and Gosport literally demanding a 'Greater Fareham' and 'Greater Gosport' rather than becoming part of Soton or Portsmouth...

c) those councils being absolutely fine with development as long as it's not for the poors, and d) bizarre imagined communities emerging out of nowhere in mere months

the biggest areas - many of them the size of entire cities - are the 'Fareham Western Wards', Locks Heath, West End, Hedge End in 60s/70s, Chandlers Ford and Boyatt Wood around Eastleigh, then Whiteley and Waterlooville - all have semi-rural gaps between them....

....which their local councils and campaign groups obsessively protect, in order to preserve the fiction that they're real villages and market towns rather than what they are, which is Bovis housing estates

the original Buchanan plans involved of course a grid of expanded road and rail transport networks to serve all of the expected growth. Rejecting the plan meant what didn't happen was the infrastructure, not the growth

the quotes from planners and councillors in there are crazy - one basically confirms that Hampshire had a 'divide and rule' policy to stop Portsmouth and Southampton from becoming more powerful than Hampshire CC and its sub-units like Fareham, Eastleigh, Winchester

* (Winchester City Council covers an area about five times the size of eg Portsmouth City Council. Populations - 45,000 and 240,000, respectively)

to end this thread, this is pertinent to 'when did the Southampton-Portsmouth rivalry begin' - 'when Hampshire County Council engineered it in order to crush the proles'