One of the clichés about the Isle of Wight is that it is England in microcosm, a miniaturised Olde England confined to another much smaller island that you can traverse in under an hour. Despite its proximity to the mainland – ferries from Southampton take around forty-five minutes – the island has long had an ambiguous status. It was only officially ceded to England by France in the thirteenth century, and until the 1990s, it had a governor, like a colonial or overseas territory.
My father’s mother and her sisters were among the Londoners who decamped to the island in the post-war years. When my family visited them in the decades that followed, the feeling of time having stopped and gone backwards was palpable. In 1950, the writer and painter Barbara Jones described the island as a series of medieval villages so pickled in the nineteenth century that they were effectively Victorian. I’ve visited at least every summer since 2018, and though it has diversified and loosened up a little, the island can still feel like a place where the nineteenth century never quite ended, a Victorian summer utopia perpetually falling into dereliction and desuetude, its eroding cliffs permanently threatening to plunge the seaside resorts below into the sea.
‘Micro’ is a frequent prefix on the island. There is a model village at Godshill, and a miniature village of small thatched houses in the town of Shanklin. This microcosmic quality inspired Julian Barnes’s England, England, a laboured satire on John Major’s nostalgic late-Thatcherite era, in which a malevolent Murdochian media corporation purchases and transforms the island into a theme park microcosm of the mainland, geared towards American tourists disappointed at the depressing reality of actually existing England. One of the corporation’s blue-sky thinkers summarises the island’s ‘offer’ to his boss as follows:
‘What’s it got we can use? A little bit of everything, I’d say, yet at the same time nothing too mega. Nothing we can’t dispense with if need be. So. One castle, rather nice: ramparts, gatehouse, keep, chapel. No moat, but we could bung one in easily enough. Next, one royal palace: Osborne House, as noted by Dr Max. Italianate. Opinions differ. Two resident monarchs: Charles the first, in captivity at the said castle before his execution; Queen Victoria, in residence at the said palace, where she died. Feature possibilities in either, I’d say. One resident famous poet: Tennyson . . . Many thatched cottages, perfect for tea-shops. Correction: most of which already are tea-shops, but suitable for upgrade . . .’
‘Fill it in!’ chortled Sir Jack. ‘Concrete it over!’
A staggering procession of the great and the good spent their winters here in the second half of the nineteenth century. I have occasionally told myself that if I ever decided to make my fortune, I would write a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style work in which some of the various figures who were at one point resident here – Victoria, Marx, Darwin, Dickens, Tennyson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Garibaldi, Wilhelm II, Nicholas II – encounter each other and discuss politics and philosophy in a Shanklin Olde Village Tea Shoppe. What makes this litany of historic names surreal for anyone who knows the Isle of Wight is the place’s decidedly ordinary character, so ordinary it comes out the other end into the actively weird.
The ordinariness owes a little to the changing patterns of residency on the island. The haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy who once patronised the place can seem, in towns like Ryde or Shanklin or Newport, to have abandoned it, but after 1945, the London working class and petite bourgeoisie flocked to the island as they left the capital and retired, turning the resort conurbation of Shanklin–Sandown into what was frequently described as ‘Little London’. From the sixties on, the Greater London Council used to buy up houses in these towns to offer to retiring Londoners, a programme that is still maintained to this day by the Greater London Authority’s Seaside and Country Homes scheme.
Listening to people speaking on buses and trains on the island, its character today is broadly proletarian, although you can, it transpires, find a few posher enclaves inland and in the yachting centre of Cowes. This working-class character extends to the seldom-discussed fact that the island was once – and to an extent still is – a major industrial centre. The yachts of Cowes have often been built in East Cowes itself, on the other side of the Medina estuary from the Royal Yachting Squadron. Skilled shipbuilding here diversified in the twentieth century into flying boats, military ships and, eventually, hovercraft, which were effectively invented at the Saunders-Roe works in East Cowes in the 1950s and put into mass production here in the subsequent decade. These superfast but energy-intensive boats were icons of the Wilsonian ‘White Heat of Technology’, lightweight, curved, almost pop art designs; aptly, a hovercraft service still operates regularly between Portsmouth and Ryde on the island, claiming to be the world’s last timetabled passenger service still using hovercraft. This sort of semi-obsolete futurism feels as much part of the island’s character as its parish churches and tea rooms. Less cutely, the expertise of East Cowes’ skilled workers has continued to lend itself to military use – there is a massive BAE Systems factory on the town’s outskirts.
How you see the island as a visitor depends greatly on your port of entry. Southampton ships go to Cowes; the ships from Lymington in the New Forest go to Yarmouth; and the Portsmouth ships depart for Ryde from Portsmouth Harbour railway station. Each area takes on some of the qualities of the port of embarkation, with Yarmouth and its surroundings resembling the New Forest, East Cowes and Newport’s red-brick industrial streets approximating those of Southampton, and Ryde, acquiring some of Portsmouth’s firmly proletarian naval aggression. This is the route I usually take.
The quintessentially English White Cliff that encircles the island is flanked to the south by the start of the Undercliff. Here, you could be not so much in the Riviera as somewhere in the South Pacific, a yellow, craggy, perpetually crumbling, subsiding wall with exotic trees growing out of and on top of it. Between these cliffs are several miles of beaches, the main attraction both for consumptive Victorian intellectuals and retired twentieth-century cockneys. It’s here, in a guest house facing the beach in Shanklin, that my partner and I stay every year. I have stared at this bay for hours, pausing for fish and chips or games of Space Invaders in the arcades. Perhaps part of the appeal of this place for me, though, was inadvertently summed up by Pennethorne Hughes in his 1960s Shell Guide to the island: it ‘rises so cheerfully from the bay that, despite having no architectural merit whatsoever, it is easy to call it beautiful’. That means, as an architectural writer, that I do not feel implored to do any work here.
The stretch between Ryde and Ventnor is the part I know best, a place to which I am – irrespective of its occasionally terrifyingly xenophobic politics – firmly and sentimentally attached. The other entry point to the island is different, and a place where it is much harder to screen out your bad thoughts. East Cowes was always just a blur of car parks and red-brick terraces. West Cowes, however, is the famous Cowes, home of the Cowes Regatta, an annual upper-class boat festival, and also the home of the Royal Yachting Squadron, which still has its own specialised Victorian cast iron pier, entered beneath an ornate lantern. The townscape is not dissimilar to that of Ryde – early Victorian, so still with a certain Georgian grace and less of Shanklin and Sandown’s gawky high-Victorian heaviness, with a lot of bay windows and a lot of verandas.
The gentle, sun-kissed melting together of melancholia and kiss-me-quick kitsch of the island I know was nowhere to be seen in Cowes in 2024. Rather than the enjoyable but faintly sad mix of tourist shops, junk shops, caffs and pubs-that-time-forgot that you find between Ryde and Ventnor, West Cowes’s main shopping street is devoted to the sort of middle-class fine dining you find in south-west London or Surrey – gastropubs, ‘Japanese fusion’ restaurants, places selling very highly priced windcheaters. One shopfront has an opaque glass wall and, in small sans serif letters, olesinski. superyachts. The major cultural attraction is a freakish collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nauticalia – paintings, model boats, figureheads – on the upper floor of a boat store, put together by one-time resident, yachter, Conservative MP and Daily Express proprietor, Max Aitken, son of the notorious Lord Beaverbrook.
Cowes gradually gives way to Newport, where all the things needed for a modern existence – general hospital, shopping mall, bus station, leisure centre, municipal offices – are clustered around a historic core still defined by a couple of surviving Nash civic buildings. People here look tired, worried and cheaply dressed, as they do in most English urban centres.
From the Victorians on, this island has, without anyone ever planning it, become a place where people have imagined their utopias, evanescent or permanent. Most of these have been personal utopias, holiday homes you would never have to leave, in a place where summer would never have to end – but there are two exceptions, two major works of architecture and landscape where a way of life has been worked out with considerable thought. Osborne and Quarr are the only two buildings that a serious architectural historian could seriously recommend on the island – though an unserious one would point out that there’s a lot else to look at. Osborne is the Italianate ‘House’ that Victoria and Albert built for themselves in the 1840s – their own Peterhof, or bonsai Versailles. It is a disturbing vision of personal luxury directly overlooking the sources of that wealth: a bronze statue of a bound slave girl on the terrace gazes out over an estuary from which the ships would have sailed to countless dirty wars in China, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere.
The other utopia overlooking the busy shipping lane is considerably more communal. Quarr Abbey was founded by French Cistercian monks in the twelfth century and destroyed under Henry VIII a few hundred years later. The French monks returned at the start of the twentieth century – fleeing the Third Republic’s secularising reforms – one of whom, Dom Paul Bellot, doubled as an architect. He designed a series of remarkable abbeys and churches in the Dutch Expressionist style; intricately constructed from red brick, placed into strange, quasi-Gothic, organic shapes: a path from nineteenth-century medievalism into an architecture of pure space and fearless form. Its austerity – hardly any sculpture, no paintings, only the most minimal stained glass – is combined with a richness of light, shafts of which emphasise the rugged arches. The bricks were imported from Flanders, but the workers were not – Quarr was built by the exact same island masons who were at the time erecting the indifferent Edwardian suburban semis and guest houses that spread around the edges of the island’s towns. They could build works like this, but that was never going to make a profit.
