Transit day 3 UK arrival

We flew midnight to dawn from Dubai into Gatwick airport. Perceptions of Britain didn't start well. The woefully inefficient passport control and badly signed airport railway station meant that it was only our pre-booking of train tickets that was "prompt". I certainly wouldn't want to have either needed to spend long at the station or to have been in great hurry to get anywhere else. Given the numbers going through it I don't see why the local authorities can't arrange a better service and information. From a machine we collected our pre-booked tickets for a train to Southampton to join our cruise ship. I managed to put some credit on our UK SIMs, which I'd had sent to Australia a week earlier. The plan is to use these if needed in Europe and in general in London. Then we went on a train gliding through the English countryside. Of course to me it all just looked like New Zealand. The poorly serviced train station at Southampton was a bit of a shock. Distinctly a second-world standard. Virtually no direction to help us get from the station to the cruise dock. We knew we had time to kill - cruise ship entry was by timed check-in - so we stopped at a nearby shopping centre. With our luggage as there was no locker facility.