The Spike (never heard it referred to in the plural) in the first half of the 20th century was the successor of the 19th century Workhouse and was run, in the main, by the local authority. It was regarded by men on tramp as a place of last resort, usually frequented by tramps (in the professional sense, as opposed to 'Tramp Navvy').

The 'Kip House', on the other hand, seems to have been the Model Lodging House - as described by Patrick MacGill. This was a commercial venture providing for transient labouring men and was the precursor of the Rowton Houses which however were established by the Victorian philanthropist Lord Rowton.

I have a very graphic and almost frightening description of a night in The Spike which is part of a memoir given to me by a man, now in his seventies, who became infatuated with the way of life of the Pincher Kiddies whom he met in his youth labouring in England. This man claims that, while those in the Kip Houses were to some extent apart from society, those who habitually stayed in the Spikes were utterly and irredeemably alienated totally from it -as indeed were many of the true Pinchers or Long Distance Kiddies such as MacAuligh met in the early 'Fifties.

As a youth I once stayed in a German 'Ubernachtstellung' in Karlsruhe which was probably their equivaqlent of a Spike and was scared out of my wits by the wild men I met there. On another occasion I stayed in one somewhere near Whitechapel in London's East End. These were places where it was advisable,once you removed your shoes or boots for bed, to put one under each of the legs below the bed head so that anyone trying to steal them would have to risk waking you up in the process!

As bad as most of these facilities were, after their demise the habitual tramping fraternity were left in a bad way because their usually weak bladders and fondness for drink made them personae non grata with landladies renting 'rooms' - the only remaining alternative. A number of the old timers died of hypothermia sleeping out under the railway arches in the big freeze up of 1963.

Ultan