Discover the best budget boutique hotels in Isle of Wight, United Kingdom

Today, the Isle of Wight is best known for its eponymous music festival, which attained a near-mythic reputation in 1970 when it was headlined by Jimi Hendrix and attended by a crowd around 600,000 strong. It was the great and good of the Victorian era, however, who cemented the island’s reputation as the destination de rigueur. Proving magnetic for royals and intellectuals alike, the island once played host to Tennyson, Swinburne, Queen Victoria and Karl Marx, effectively turning the isle in to a high-tier salon. Its apparent ability to bewitch is somewhat demystified once you’re armed with the knowledge that the island enjoys some 2,000 hours of sunshine every year, a figure that crowns it as the best and brightest spot in this usually rain-sodden land. Spend a summer evening entranced by the isle’s limestone cliffs – or indeed the peach-pinkish façade of regal summer home Osborne House in East Cowes – as the stone echoes the colours of the setting sun.