https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Port_of_SouthamptonThe Port of Southampton is a major passenger and cargo port located in the central part of the south coast of England. It has been an important port since the Roman occupation of Britain nearly two thousand years ago, and has a multifaceted history
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The service was under-utilised towards the end and with the recent opening of the Channel Tunnel plus the loss of duty-free sales and declining freight it was decided that after the lease of the vessel expired that the service would stop and it ceased on 27 October 1996.
It's actually more complex than that - the regular continuous ferry service ceased "by 1984" and the reference above is to a new 1991 startup. A cross channel freight service also ran in 2004 for about a year.
Southampton is an excellent deep sea / long distance port. However, it would seem that the lesson of recent history is that it is too far up the estuary for efficient short-hop journeys to the continent, which are better servered from more immediate locations at Portsmouth and Poole. In any case, travel to Europe has changed with flying and the Channel Tunnel now being major players, and we have lost so many ship / boat services - places like Folkestone and Weymouth are no longer ferry ports, and from Harwich and Newcastle we are down to a single destination.
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