Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital

The story of Netley in Southampton – its hospital, its people and the secret history of the 20th Century.

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 the Second World War, GIs drove their jeeps down its corridors.

Born out of the bloody mess of the Crimean War, rising literally out of its own foundations – its bricks made from clay excavated on the site – Netley’s hospital would serve a century’s worth of conflict before it met its own demise just one hundred years 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.