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The world’s best wrecks and ruins

Oliver Smith takes us on a tour of train graveyards, bunkers, ghost towns, crumbling palaces – and a 7,000-bedroom hotel in North Korea that never even opened

3 December 2022

9:00 AM

3 December 2022

9:00 AM

Atlas of Abandoned Places: A Journey Through the World’s Forgotten Wonders Oliver Smith

Mitchell Beazley, pp.224, 20

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.

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