Interesting that military conservatism seems to have meant that the internal design of the building was out of date when it was built. 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. 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'. Not quite what I was expecting from the cover. In the process he deals with his own past, and his own relationship to its history. In Spike Island, Philip Hoare has written a biography of a building. 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.
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. 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. 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. The story of Netley in Southampton its hospital, its people and the secret history of the 20th-century.
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