This is Sholing, where I grew up. There was little to distinguish it from other suburbs, still less as an adjunct to a port; a transient place which people passed through rather than visited for itself, Sholing had little claim on the national consciousness. A jumble of Victorian villas, 1920s semis and post-war estates, its name – Anglo-Saxon, meaning ‘the hill by the shore’ – may have dated back to the Domesday Book, but the place no longer had any discernible centre, its borders only vaguely marked by vestigial streams and river valleys once wide enough to earn the area its ancient title. Once the sea came closer to these hills; more recently, this was still open countryside, Hampshire heathland rolling gently eastwards from Southampton, yielding soft fruit from its fields, shingle from gravel pits, bricks out of clay seams, water from its springs. For centuries its common land was used as a military camp, as archery grounds and shooting ranges, a place for soldiers, travellers and horse traders.
Then, gradually, its population began to grow, shifted here by the industrialisation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the incomers this indefinable area needed an identity, something to give it meaning; the one it acquired came from a past which its more genteel residents would have preferred to forget: Spike Island.
Ask any local of a certain age or disposition and they’ll come up with various explanations for the nickname. Some cite the heathland’s characteristic gorse, Ulex europeaus, which still sprouts up wherever it can, spiky and resilient, once collected by furze-cutters for fuel or cattle fodder. Its toughness has its own romance as ‘one of the great signature plants of commonland and rough open space, places where lovers can meet, walk freely and lose themselves, if need be, in its dense thickets’. Others attribute the name to the spike shape of the area itself, a memory of the time when the sea did indeed come closer to its hills, yet an island now only within the extended boundaries of the rivers Itchen and Hamble which separate this peninsula from the rival city ports of Southampton and Portsmouth.
Of little agricultural benefit, until 1796 the heath was marked on maps as ‘Nomans Land’, and held just forty-three permanent inhabitants. Only in the last years of the eighteenth century, as the common land began to be privatised by the Enclosures Act, did houses appear in any number: low brick cottages built by travellers attracted by the troops stationed on the common with whom they could trade.
Marked out by the caravans in which many of them still lived, they were looked down upon by the inhabitants of the older villages of Weston, Woolston and Netley nearby. Perhaps it is no coincidence that ‘spike’ was also argot for the workhouse, or that the gypsies called themselves ‘pikeys’, another potential source for the nickname. Long established in Hampshire and its New Forest, they were living outside the confines of normal life on this furzy heathland, its spiny gorse somehow expressive of their own resilience, and perhaps this sense of being outside, of being beyond the law and civilisation, informed the most romantic of the explanations for Sholing’s nickname. It was claimed that convicts being transported to Australia were held on its common, chained by their feet to a great spike.
Transportees convicted at Winchester’s courts were certainly marched to the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, and could have been stabled for the night there, just as their fellow inmates from Dorchester gaol were held overnight in a prison-like barn with slit windows and oak studded doors, ‘all chained to a central post’. The place became known as ‘Botany Bay Farm’, just as the first part of Sholing to be settled in the 1790s was nicknamed ‘Botany Bay’ after the new penal colony of New South Wales.
From 1831 to 1840, more than 50,000 men and women were transported from England. The gypsies were particular victims of these purges, subject to persecution in the Southampton area in the tumultuous first few decades of the nineteenth century. With a population driven by the enclosures from the country to the city, crime rates and a general instability necessitated the invention of a new sort of English colony, an ‘official Siberia’. These penal settlements came to occupy some impossibly remote part of the public imagination, places of horror and damnation where men made pacts to kill themselves in order to escape the appalling conditions.
If Sholing’s Spike Island had witnessed the export of unwanted Englishmen and women to become colonial forced labour, then perhaps it was a mirror image of the slave trade that had been carried out from other British ports, at Bristol and Liverpool, where other Spike Islands would be found. But if Botany Bay was the slavery of Britons by any other name, then the most likely explanation for Sholing’s nickname seemed both to reflect this sense of a prison colony on the other side of the world, and to relate it closer to home.
Across the Irish Sea, a small island off Cobh in Cork Harbour had been settled by monks in the seventh century. Its name was Inis Pich – Spike Island – depicted on early maps as a spike-shaped piece of land. Used since Cromwellian times for holding Irish rebels, by 1847 Spike had become a dedicated penal colony, a nineteenth-century Robben Island for deportees, ‘From th’emerald island/Ne’er to see dry land/Until they spy land/In sweet Botany Bay.’ Up to 4,000 convicts at one time were held here, clad in grey jackets, moving great mountains of earth and rock to construct the island’s fortifications, building their own prison walls. Many would be buried in the bleak ‘convicts’ graveyard’ in one corner of the island, marked only by numbered headstones. In 1916 Spike would be used to confine the insurrectionists of the Easter Rising and the seeds of modern troubles. The island was handed back to the Irish in 1938, but its inmates could still be identified by particular tattoos indelibly marking its provenance on their hands, as indelibly as the island was marked with its past.
There was, I now realise, an almost genetic reason for my mythologising of my suburban surroundings, for my fascination with these tenuous traces of local history: their arcane details seemed to reference a greater story; a personal thread which linked the legends of Sholing-as-Spike Island. My maternal forefathers had been involved in the slave trade in Liverpool, while my father’s ancestors had fled Ireland during the potato famine. Such dark romantic notions counterpointed the ordinariness of present-day suburbia, and seemed to ally me to Sholing’s shadowy epithet. They gave my rootlessness an identity.
By a strange process of insult and immigration, the infamy of Ireland’s Spike Island, wreathed in crime, insurrection and its terrifying consequences, had been transposed to an odd little suburb hundreds of miles away in southern England. In the mid-nineteenth century, Irish workers were attracted by the ship-building industries of Southampton and Woolston’s dockyards, and by the shipping lines which had begun to ply between Southampton and New York. Just as the gypsies had acquired the slur of ‘Botany Bay’, so the incoming Irish brought with them the reputation of Spike Island – used either in half-ironic humour by themselves for their southern exile, or by their suspicious neighbours as a slur on their supposedly criminal characters. They would come to glory in the nickname, perhaps as a rebellious gesture against the moneyed class which also began to move into the neighbourhood.
Courtesy of the railway and Southampton’s growing port, land here had begun to command a premium, and in the 1850s came more houses, constructed from the products of the local brickworks and gravel pits; slowly at first, then moving more swiftly along the new railway line from Southampton to Portsmouth, over a horizon as yet undarkened by brick and slate. Then grander houses appeared, wide double-fronted houses in yellow brick, as if their colour marked them out from the commoner product of Spike Island’s clay and its brickworks. Invested with authority and capital, their inhabitants aspired to gentility, with their mock turrets, conservatories and brick walls. Sholing acquired the veneer of respectability; the institutions of church, freemasonry and local politics. Its pines and cedars and holly hedges set out the social status of its merchants, vicars, doctors, shop-keepers, all firm in their expectations of the future.
Then the unthinkable happened, and Armageddon intervened on this complacent scene. After the First World War the serried ranks of ‘homes for heroes’ marched over the land, their strip-like plots providing every Englishman with his own piece of land. The larger, older houses shrank into flats or nursing homes, or disappeared into rubble and rhododendron; gypsy cottages became bungalows or crumbled back into the dirt from which they came. After the Second World War, developers finished what the bombs had started. Spike Island was swallowed up by modern suburbia and