It was significant in the French intervention following the Glorious Revolution. In recent times it has been the site of a correctional facility for youth; it became mildly notorious when the inmates mutinied and briefly controlled the area, thus recapitulating the traditional pirate hold.
Spike Island, Halton Borough, Widnes, Liverpool, England, a birthplace of the British chemical industry, is a reclaimed toxic waste site. The island is on the Mersey Estuary, a RAMSAR wetland Its maze of abandoned chemical factories, railroad lines, canal and industrial dockage, and industrial pollution, which had declined into a rust belt toxic wilderness, was reclaimed as woodland, wetlands and green space, 1975-1982. It is at the center of the Mersey Forest, one of Britain's Community Forests.
Spike Island was the site of a legendary outdoor live concert by the Britpop group, Stone Roses May, 1990.
Spike Island, Bristol, Avon, U.K. is the site of Spike Island Artspace, a collective of artists' studios located in a former tea-packing factory. Spike Island is an area of central Bristol which lies between the Floating Harbour and the New Cut of the River Avon.
Spike Island, Southampton, Hampshire, England, was the site of Netley's Royal Victoria Military Hospital, completed in 1863 (demolished). The monstrously large hospital has been evoked in Philip Hoare, Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital, 2001, which interweaves personal recollections with the chilling dark history of this vast hospital, whose design was criticized by Florence Nightingale, Postmen used to ride bicycles along the quarter-mile corridors to deliver mail, where convalescing American GIs later drove their jeeps. Spike Island was witness to early psychiatric experimentation, and tragic World War I shell-shock victims: the British war poet Wilfred Owen was a patient at Netley after the Battle of the Somme. Even Sherlock Holmes's companion, Dr. Watson, revealed, in the opening lines of 'A Study in Scarlet', that he had attended a Netley course for army surgeons.