Stokes Bay

Stokes Bay (grid ref.: SZ 590 980) is an area of the Solent that lies just south of Gosport, between Portsmouth and Lee-on-the-Solent, Hampshire. There is a shingle beach that has a great view of Ryde and East Cowes on the Isle of Wight to the south and also Fawley in the south west. The village of Alverstoke is close by. The annual Stokes Bay Festival takes place here every year during Cowes Week.

To the east of Stokes Bay is Fort Gilkicker, which was built in 1871 to guard the headland and the western approaches to Portsmouth Harbour and housed 22 gun emplacements. It was used in both world wars to protect Portsmouth and air attacks and fell into disrepair shortly after 1945; it is on the Buildings at Risk Register and support is being sought for its conservation and for an alternative use.

There was also a pier, adjacent to Gosport and Fareham Inshore Rescue Lifeboat station, from which a ferry service ran which was the quickest crossing to the Isle of Wight. The pier had a railway station, opened 6 April 1863, which had a branch line (Stokes Bay Line) from the Fareham to Gosport Line. This railway stopped running services to the pier on 1 November 1915 and sold the land to the Admiralty in 1922. The line was not as popular as the Portsmouth to Ryde crossing although the journey from London was longer than from Portsmouth. Most of the railway line is a cycle path.

The Admiralty used the pier from 1922 to transport munitions and fuel and had a narrow gauge railway line which replaced the branch line. The pier was then used as a torpedo station and fell into disrepair before being demolished in the late 1970s. The Solent opposite Stokes Bay is often used by extremely large warships (e.g. US supercarriers) to anchor, as Portsmouth Harbour is not deep enough to berth them. It has also been the site of many fleet reviews, the most recent being to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar in 2005.

To the east is the 9-hole Gosport and Stokes Bay Golf Club. This area of the Bay also contains a number of fresh and salt-water margin lagoons and provides a unique habitat for rare flora, including several specimens of the Kermes Oak (A shrub of the Quercus family, native to the Mediterranean).