Sight Magazine – Books: An Exploration of Some of the Lost Corners of the World

Oliver Smith
Atlas of Abandoned Places: A Journey Through the Forgotten Wonders of the World
Mitchell Beasley, 2022
ISBN-13: 978-1784726928

I love exploring the lesser-known corners of the world – and award-winning travel writer Oliver Smith Atlas of abandoned places allows the reader to do just that, transporting us to some of the most unique – and weird – places in the world.

Featuring stark, sometimes post-apocalyptic images and maps, the atlas provides details of some 50 locations around the world. Some of the places you may already be familiar with – the Maunsell forts off the British coast, for example, have been well covered elsewhere, as has the town of Pripyat in present-day Ukraine, abandoned due to the disaster Chernobyl nuclear project, others – like the strange little castles of Burk Al Babas in Turkey or the nostalgia-tinged ruins of Fordlandia in the United States – that you may never have encountered before.

The locations featured – which range from humble homes and infrastructure from past wars to grand palaces and even entire cities – have been abandoned for a variety of reasons – from disasters to financial difficulties and the movement of history.

“In the 21st century, these abandoned places seem to have growing relevance,” Smith writes in the introduction. “They seem anachronistic to us on an overpopulated planet of nearly eight billion inhabitants. Today, every parcel of the Earth has been mapped: there are no longer great mountains to conquer or deserts to cross. But we feels that terra incognita is now in our midst, in places that have been left behind, that have faded away as we go.”

Not all of the sites listed can be visited – and, in fact, some are dangerous or illegal – and many are located in remote locations. But each has a fascinating, sometimes tragic, story behind them.

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Take the Palace of Sans Souci in Haiti, for example. It was built by Henri Christophe, a former slave who was among the leaders of a revolution against the French colonial masters, who became Henri I, the first and only king of Haiti, and was nicknamed by some the “Versailles of the Caribbean”. It was abandoned after Henri’s suicide (and the murder of his son) after an earthquake destroyed much of it in 1842. It offers a fascinating window into Haiti’s tumultuous past.

A quirky read for the insatiably curious.