Philip Hoare: Hell upon earth and other shocking impieties

Out walking in the New Forest, my seven-year-old nephew Jacob turned to me and said: "Do you know what memento mori means?" Somewhat taken aback, I was about to enlighten him, in that casual but loftily avuncular manner one adopts on such occasions, when he told me: "It means: 'Remember you will die'."

Jacob was quoting from the latest kid-lit trend: Lemony Snicket's ghoulish bestsellers (complete with protagonists named after Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe). But as the nights draw in and Will Self reworks Dorian Gray, and Sam Mendes overlays his Road to Perdition with a subfusc funereality, I sense a gothic turn to the zeitgeist. Maybe it's because I spent Friday night lecturing in the remains of a Victorian military hospital; or maybe it's because, as I write this in Southampton, dark-bodied Chinooks are whirring overhead, en route for a rendezvous in Iraq.

Two new art openings made the gothic connection last week. Wim Delvoye's "Gothic Works" is the first show to occupy the new exhibition space of Manchester Art Gallery. Recently revamped at a cost of £35m, the gallery is evidently hoping to capitalise on the popular success of Tate Modern (even as Sir Nicholas Serota's empire started to look a little financially shaky last week, sending an attendant chill down the backs of lesser galleries – and dealers).

I saw Delvoye's work in New York during the summer. The Belgian artist operates both in Ghent and Manhattan, and he's become famous for his Cloaca show at SoHo's New Museum, where the installations included photographs of pigs tattooed with heraldic designs (reminiscent of JK Huysmans' bejewelled but ultimately doomed tortoise in his decadent breviary, Against Nature. There was also a production line machine designed to reproduce artificially the human digestive system – complete with the inevitable and odoursome end-product. Manchester hasn't been treated to that, but it does have Delvoye's gothic "stained-glass" windows, constructed from X-rays of fellating humans and copulating pigs. Even more remarkable are Delvoye's bits of gothic plant machinery – JCB given a makeover by AWP – Augustus Welby Pugin, that is.

It was at the capital's latest deluxe dive, the Wellington Club, where I found Siobhan Fahey ensconced under a blood-red neon cross and a wall-full of Damien Hirst's imprisoned butterflies. With her pale face framed by Celtic locks, Fahey is no mean gothic heroine herself – you'll recall her Mary Shelley impersonations in Shakespears (sic) Sister videos. Now she's about to revive her pop career, and described to me the gothic typography adorning her forthcoming electro-clash release (complete with New Order samples). Meanwhile, around us the Knightsbridge bacchanalia was in full swing, as the venue shrugged off its recent court case, when three London footballers were accused of assaulting its doormen.

Actually, the place reminded me of a 1729 tract I uncovered while researching in the Guildhall library. With the sensational title, Hell Upon Earth, Or, the Town in an Uproar, Occasion'd by the late horrible Scenes of Forgery, Perjury, Street-Robbery, Murder, Sodomy, and other Shocking Impieties – this Georgian version of Hello! includes a 24-hour guide to London's decadent perfidies, detailing exactly in which alleyway and at which hour you could find a prostitute of either sex. Another section describes "The Character of a FOP" who "consults his Taylor with as much Care as the ancient Greeks did the Oracle at Delphos, He is no great Friend to the Tobacconist, for Fear of his Lungs, yet he holds a Pipe to his Mouth to make his Diamond Ring the more conspicuous". It all sounded so familiar: a quick scan round the Wellington provided plenty of 21st-century foppish equivalents.

A modern Utopia

I wasn't going to risk deep-vein thrombosis by attending the full nine hours of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy at the National Theatre, but as I'm currently writing about Utopian sects, I did brave its first three hours, Voyage – less a piece of theatre than a series of beautifully staged vignettes, including a great decadent masked ball – a scene which wouldn't look out of place in the pages of Hell Upon Earth. But with characters declaiming Kant, Hegel and 19th-century nihilism, it's not exactly cosy stuff for your average National Theatre crowd, and the last act was punctuated by the shuffling feet of a none the less sold-out auditorium.

And yet, in a dumbed-down age, The Coast of Utopia is an impressive project. It is concerned with cultural identity: how are we defined by our culture? Scan the media – the reality TV shows, the music charts (a "crashing bore" as Morrissey declared in one of his more Wildean pronouncements at the Albert Hall last week), and the mindless obsession with every permutation of sport – and the idea of the cramp-inducing difficulties of Stoppard's trilogy become more and more attractive.

As does Utopia itself, I suppose. Discussing the subject over lunch with BBC History Magazine, the editor, Greg Neale, came up with a great line: "Of course, you know the nearest modern equivalent of Utopia? Friends."

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Having just written an article for Neale on Southampton, I was back in my home town to appear on local radio and to give a talk on Netley hospital. I've always been frustrated by Southampton's ignorance of its history. After all, this is the port from which Henry V sailed for Agincourt, which boasted an 18th-century spa to rival Bath (and indeed was home to Jane Austen – although she mentioned the place only once in her fiction, when the city served to remind her of "the smell of stinking fish"). In the 20th century it was "the Gateway to the Empire", and everyone from the Prince of Wales to Noël Coward and Winston Churchill passed through its luxury hotel.

Now the South Western has been turned into the inevitable apartments, and the fabulous art deco Ocean Terminal was knocked down by a philistine corporation in 1981. The Titanic sailed from here; but it has taken 80 years for the city to put up a plaque on the offices of the White Star Line. Recently an American professor who came to the city to research Titanic told me that even with the aid of a high-ranking city official, she couldn't get to see the dock from which the liner sailed. "Back home, we'd have themed Titanic hamburger concessions," she said. That's one point in favour of a-historical city councils. Anyway, a forward-looking passenger port is hardly likely to celebrate history's most notorious sinking, is it?

Southampton is equally ambivalent about its other claims to fame – perhaps for good reason. The Spitfire was designed and built here; but the company was founded by the proto-fascist Noel Pemberton Billing, a man who, in the First World War, wanted enemy aliens (that is, German Jews) to be forced to wear cloth badges denoting their inferior status and be denied entry to air-raid shelters.

And while it was a glamorous inter-war port, as Southampton University's ethnic minorities historian Tony Kushner has just discovered, the city also had a detention centre in the 1920s, euphemistically called the "Atlantic Hotel". Here European refugees (again, many of them Jewish) were held after being rejected by New York's Ellis Island. Many languished in the "hotel" (funded by the shipping lines of Cunard and P&O) for up to seven years. These stories are still emerging out of the murkier chambers of history; far from being another country, the past often looks like a disturbingly familiar place. And those helicopters are still flying overhead.