DAVID ADAMS satisfies his curiosity about some of the world’s hidden places…
Oliver Smith
Atlas of Abandoned Places: A Journey Through The World’s Forgotten Wonders
Mitchell Beasley, 2022
ISBN-13: 978-1784726928
I love exploring the lesser known corners of the world – and award-winning travel writer Oliver Smith’s Atlas of Abandoned Places allows the reader to do just that, transporting us to some of the world’s most unique – and weirdest – places.
Featuring stark, at times post-apocalyptic, imagery and maps, the atlas provides details of some 50 places across the globe. Some of the places you may well already be well acquainted with – the Maunsell Forts off the UK coast, for example, have been well covered elsewhere as has the city of Pripyat in what is now Ukraine, abandoned due to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, others – like the odd tiny castles of Burk Al Babas in Turkey or the nostalgia-tinged ruins of Fordlandia in the US – you may not have come across before.
The places featured – which range from humble homes and the infrastructure of past wars to grandiose palaces and even entire cities – have been abandoned for a range of reasons – everything from disasters to financial difficulties and the move of history.
“In the 21st century, these abandoned places seem to have a growing relevance,” writes Smith in the introduction. “They strike us as anachronisms in a crowded planet of almost eight billion people. Today, every speck of Earth has been mapped: there are no great mountains to conquer or wildernesses left to cross. But there is a sense that the terra incognita is now in our midst, in places that have been left behind, that have lapsed as we have progressed.”
Not all of the listed sites can be visited – and, indeed, some it’s dangerous or illegal to do so – and many are located in remote places. But each has a fascinating, sometimes tragic, story behind it.
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Take the Palace of Sans Souci in Haiti, for example. It was built by Henri Christophe, a former enslaved person who was among the leaders of a revolution against French colonial masters, who became Henri I, the first and only king of Haiti, and was dubbed by some as the “Versailles of the Caribbean”. It was abandoned following Henri’s suicide (and the murder of his son) after an earthquake destroyed much of it in 1842. It provides a fascinating window into Haiti’s tumultuous past.
A quirky read for the insatibly curious.
