Alum Bay and the Needles

Isle of Wight

The Needles

Please click thumbnails for larger picture.

Old postcards are sometimes poorly produced and grainy, I've done my best to scan them. Dates are from the card or my estimate (where possible). The producer of the Card is shown when possible.

A rather romantic card of the Needles, probably about 1910

The Needles are the western most point of the Isle of Wight and are a series of chalk stacks which protrude into the see at the end of which is a lighthouse. Nearby is Alum Bay, which is home of the famous coloured sand but is has a rather commercialised 'pleasure park'. The is a chairlift from the top of the cliff to the beach. The sea around the Needles was notorious for shipwrecks. The first lighthouse was built in 1785 on top of the downs, the current one during from the 1850's. A helicopter pad was added in the 1990's and the lighthouse subsequently became automated and unmanned.

Black's guide of 1880 describes them:

The celebrated Needles are five "isolated masses of the extreme west point of the middle range of Downs, which have been produced by the decomposition and wearing away of the rock in the direction of the joints or fissures with which the strata are traversed The angular or wedge-shaped form of these rocks has resulted from the highly-inclined northward dip of the beds of which they are composed." The appellation Needles has been traced by some to the German niecler fels, or " nether cliff;" but, more probably, was suggested by the numerous pinnacles starting up from each rugged mass, or by the lofty conical rock, 120 feet high, known as " Lot's Wife: which fell into the sea, in 1764, with a clash and a roar audible at Portsmouth harbour. The channel between the Needles and the Dorsetshire coast is called The Race. There is something imposing wrote Mr. Rush, the American ambassador, in 1817, "in entering England by this access". " I afterwards" he continued, " entered at Dover in a packet from Calais--my eye fixed upon the sentinels as they slowly paced the heights. But those cliffs, bold as they are, and immortalized by Shakespeare, did not equal the passage through the Needles"


A very early card of the Needles dated 1903. At this time messages could not be written on the back of postcards. (Tuck)	Needles 1904 also showing the battery. (Stengel)

Needles and the Battery about 1920.	The Needles, around 1920. (Photochrom)

Scratchells Bay from the west, the Needles would have been behind the photographer. Dated 1917. (Hartmann)	Taken from Scratchell's Bay, card dated 1923. The boat was used to reach the beach, as it cannot be reached in any other way. (Sweetman)

An early Arial view of the Needles. (Photo Precision)	The Needles lighthouse from the sea, probably during the 1950's, note the crane on the left used when it was being provisioned. (Nigh)

A Brannon print of the Needles, 1859.	The Needles looking across Alum Bay, undated. (Valentines)