Isle of Wight

The Isle of Wight is an island off the south coast of England, opposite Southampton. Popularized from Victorian times as a holiday resort, it is known for its areas of natural beauty and as home to the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes, a town that hosts a world famous annual regatta. Colloquially, it is known as "The Island" by its residents and it possesses a rich history including its own brief status as a vassal kingdom in the fifteenth century, home to poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and Queen Victoria's much loved summer residence and final home Osborne House. Its maritime history encompasses boat building and sail making through to the manufacture of flying boats and the world's first hovercraft. It is home to the Isle of Wight Festival which in 1970 was one of the largest Rock music events ever held with estimates reaching 600,000 attendees, overtaking the record set at Woodstock a year earlier. The island is also one of the richest fossil locations for dinosaurs in Europe. In 686AD, it became the last part of the United Kingdom to convert to Christianity - almost a century after the rest of the mainland.

Notable literary and musical references

• The Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four", written by Paul McCartney, refers to a rented summer cottage on the Isle of Wight.
• Called The Island within Thomas Hardy's ficitonal Wessex, the setting of many novels in which fictional place names refered real places on which they were based.
• In a similar fashion the island, with fictionalized placenames, is the setting of Maxwell Gray's 1886 novel, The Silence of Dean Maitland http://www.sakoman.net/gutenberg/1/0/9/9/10993/10993.txt.
• The Isle of Wight is the setting of Julian Barnes's utopian novel England, England.
• The island also features heavily in John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids and Simon Clark's sequel to it, The Night of the Triffids.
• Robert Rennick has written a series of detective thrillers set on the Island, including The Fallen