Explore the places that time forgot. Abandoned, mysterious, sleeping
monuments around the world have been relegated to the margins of
history, pushed off the map and out of sight.
From ancient ruins and crumbling castles to more recent relics - an art
deco New York subway station, a Soviet ghost town in the Arctic Circle,
a flooded Thai mall teeming with aquatic life - Travis Elborough takes
you on a journey into these strange, overlooked and disappearing
worlds and immortalises their fates.
Original maps and stunning colour photography accompany Travis
Elborough's moving historic and geographic accounts of each site.
The featured locations are a stark reminder of what was, and the
accounts in this investigative book help to bring their stories back
to life, telling us what happened, when and why, and to whom.
The book features 40 sites, including:
- Santa Claus, Arizona, USA: A festive tourist resort turned ghost
town deep in the desert where once you could meet Santa Claus any day
of the year;
- Crystal Palace Subway, London, UK: One of the city's best-kept
secrets is an underground, cathedral-like relic from where many
Victorian commuters bustled through;
- Montserrat, West Indies: The small Caribbean island with a
population of 5,000 that was evacuated when its volcano erupted
in 1995. The volcano is still active and nearly half the island
remains a designated exclusion zone;
- Balaklava Submarine Base, Crimea: The former top-secret Soviet
submarine base that was kept off all official maps and known as Object
825 GTS;
- Volterra Psychiatric Hospital, Tuscany, Italy: Once dubbed 'the
place of no return', this long-closed lunatic asylum once housed 6,000
patients who were never allowed to leave.
Also in the Unexpected Atlas series: Atlas of Improbable Places,
Atlas of Untamed Places, Atlas of the Unexpected and Atlas of
Vanishing Places (WINNER Illustrated Book of the Year - Edward Stanford
Travel Writing Awards 2020).
