Spike Island, Cheshire

Spike Island today from the Catalyst Museum

Spike Island, Halton Borough, Widnes, England, a birthplace of the British chemical industry, is a reclaimed toxic waste site. The island is in the Mersey Estuary, a Ramsar Convention site.

Its maze of abandoned chemical factories, rail 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 between 1975 and 1982. A surviving warehouse is now the home of the Catalyst Museum, the only science museum in the UK solely devoted to chemistry.

Spike Island was the site of a famous outdoor concert by the Manchester group The Stone Roses in May 1990.

It is often known locally as simply Spikey

External links

• The Catalyst Museum
• BBC Short film on the Stone Roses Spike Island concert.