The world’s best wrecks and ruins

Ruins, shipwrecks and lost cities are endlessly intriguing. I once went to Kolmanskop in Namibia and found myself wondering quite what it was that was so alluring. At one level it’s just a rather dowdy German town out in the desert, abandoned in 1956. But what’s special there is the sand and the way it has sifted through halls and kitchens and up the stairs. It’s as if a little bit of our history had somehow ground to halt and got left behind.

The travel writer Oliver Smith has a neat phrase for these places: ‘enclaves of the past’. In his Atlas of Abandoned Places, he offers us 50 wrecks and ruins, all exquisitely photographed and mapped. Ciudad Perdida (Columbia) is the odd one out, having lain empty since the 16th century. The rest were victims of more recent misfortune, be it war, weather, lava, radiation or just plain human folly. One place, Fukushima (Japan), was only evacuated in 2011, and its supermarket shelves are still laden with special offers and shampoo.

Although subtitled ‘A Journey Through the World’s Forgotten Wonders’, we learn that this is our journey, not the author’s.  Most of these places are out of bounds, or too remote or dangerous to visit. Wittenoom, in Australia, is dusted in lethal asbestos, and Saddam’s palaces are deep in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Japanese island town of Hashima, once one the most densely populated places on Earth (and the setting for Skyfall), is now in danger of imminent collapse. Fortunately there are madmen called ‘Urbexers’, or urban explorers, who are prepared to make the journey and scramble over the wire.  Often it’s their stories and photos that Smith gathers together.

It’s a remarkable collection of wonders.