Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital

by Philip Hoare

The story of Netley in Southampton its hospital, its people and the secret history of the 20th-century. Now with a new afterword uncovering astonishing evidence of Netley's links with Porton Down & experiments with LSD in the 1950s.It was the biggest hospital ever built. Stretching for a quarter of a mile along the banks of Southampton Water, the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley was an expression of Victorian imperialism in a million red bricks, a sprawling behemoth so vast that when the Americans took it over in World War II, GIs drove their jeeps down its corridors. Born out of the bloody mess of the Crimean War, it would see the first women serving in the military, trained by Florence Nightingale; the first vaccine for typhoid; and the first purpos- built military asylum. Here Wilfred Owen would be brought along with countless other shell-shocked victims of World War I captured on film, their tremulous ghosts still haunted the asylum a generation later. In Spike Island, Philip Hoare has written a biography of a building. In the process he deals with his own past, and his own relationship to its history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

Paperback

First published April 2, 2001

About the author

Philip Hoare is an English writer, especially of history and biography. He instigated the Moby Dick Big Read project. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton and Leverhulme artist-in-residence at the Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011.

Reviews

[Avril]

Not quite what I was expecting from the cover. The military hospital is only about half the book, the rest is history of the area and the author's personal links to it.As the back blurb (which I failed to read when I first picked it up) says an 'archaeology of place'. I get the impression that the original intention was to write a scholarly book on the hospital that was thwarted by a scarcity of written documents.Seems the military is very good at destroying/ losing records.

Interesting that military conservatism seems to have meant that the internal design of the building was out of date when it was built. Florence Nightingales recommendations based on her experience in Crimean hospitals seems to have been ignored in favor of old ideas that made the huge hospital impractical/inefficient and unhealthy from the outset. The asylum psychiatric wing) saw early treatments for battlefield stress/post traumatic stress from WWI onward some of which would probably be very questionable today.

Once I had reassessed what kind of book I was reading I quite enjoyed it.

[Darren Holbrook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book

[Seamus Mcduff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as part of research, hoping to find historical background for something I'm working on. In some ways I'm not sure why anyone would read a book like this otherwise, unless you lived in the area and are interested in its history.
Philip Hoare is a good writer and has an excellent and colourful command of the language; I do think he might make too much use of the thesaurus, and likes to use certain uncommon phrases like 'Fin de Siècle' and words like 'conflate' a lot. It's been a while since I've had to reach so often for my (iPhone) dictionary.
Nevertheless there are some historical gems in here, although a large part of the book is not about Netley military hospital at all, but about the ruined Abbey and its history and that of Southampton. Also there is quite a lot of the story of the author's own upbringing which seems a little off-topic given the subject of the book: "Spike Island - a memory of a military hospital".
All in all, the author builds up a fascinating picture of a truly amazing Victorian-era building, and you really feel the loss of something grand and unique when it is abandoned and eventually pulled down.

[Lindsay Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

I happened to stumble across the remains of what was the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley some years ago without knowing any of it's history. Philip Hoare's in depth account is probably the most detailed work on the subject currently available.
A fascinating history piece, albeit somewhat slow to start, it vividly describes the Victorian 'splendour' of how we once believed we should nurse our war injured.
The hospital must have been a truly remarkable sight in it's day. Alas, now all gone, save the Chapel, a victim of 1960's short-sighted urban planners.

[Saturday's Child · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I enjoyed this story I was hoping for more historical information on Netley Hospital and the Australian soldiers who were treated there. Having said that it must be difficult to write the history of a building such as Netley when hardly any of it's records survived its destruction.