What we can learn from the eerie and mysterious worlds we leave behind

Sometimes it’s good the boss goes away on holiday. Not just for the increased office chat in their absence, but for what happens when they return. About 10 years ago, the managing director in the publishing company where I worked came back tanned and relaxed from his trip to Cambodia, enthusing to his staff about the wonders of the ruins at Angkor.

Listening to him, I thought that it would be good to do a book about places like Angkor – these curious worlds that we’ve left behind – eerily quiet ghost towns, trains half-buried in the sand, forlorn movie palaces, roller coasters entangled in vines. They have history to them, but a sense of mystery, too. When we see photographs of these places, it makes us stop and wonder: what happened here?

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I put forward the idea and, about a year later and in slightly different form, we published Abandoned Places. From Cold War bunkers to radiation zones, whaling stations in the South Atlantic to ships perched high and dry in the desert of the Aral Sea, it explores through different photographers’ work, and my words, more than 100 lost worlds.

In surveying these ruins, the book explains the story of how each place came to be abandoned – whether through natural or chemical disaster, war, economic collapse or changing tastes and customs.

At Canfranc on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees stands an immense white elephant of a railway station. Opened in 1928, the grand Beaux-Arts building was constructed to meet demand for cross-border traffic. When I visited in 1991, though, underfunding and a collapsed bridge on the French side had long since brought any international traffic to an end. There the station sat, looking a little embarrassed in all its pomp but no purpose, as it slowly fell apart. A bizarre place, but rather sad.

When we abandon places, something is lost, but something is gained too. As journalist Murray Kempton wrote: ‘Nothing preserves like neglect.’ Untouched by modernisation – or efforts at restoration – lost worlds can be time capsules. Varosha is a deserted and largely out-of-bounds beach resort in Northern Cyprus, a casualty of the Turkish invasion of 1974 when the town’s Greek Cypriot population fled.

But if you’re lucky enough to be allowed a visit, or one of the urban explorers who’ve dared sneak their way in, you can steal a glimpse into the past. The mannequins displaying the latest fashions in the shop windows, the bleached menus printed outside restaurants and the car showrooms are just as they were when the people left 50 years ago.

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Another attraction of these islands of abandonment is in being given a chance to see what the world would look like without us. It can surprise us just how quickly trees encroach on buildings or plant life erupts through tarmac. When Varosha was thriving, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were among its visitors. For decades afterwards, the beach was free from people – and that opened up new opportunities. Without human life, nature could start reclaiming the area. In Varosha, rare sea turtles returned to the empty beach to lay their eggs. During Covid we saw some of this reclamation, when wild goats wandered into Llandudno. Or, in the absence of tourist traffic, how clear the water in Venice’s canals became.

As teenagers in the 1980s, my sister and I climbed through the fence around Battersea Power Station, decommissioned a few years earlier. Scrambling around the ruins of the railway sidings and dilapidated buildings, we were allowed the space to imagine what this deserted expanse had once been like. 

In reissuing the book, we’ve had a chance to update the text. So what’s changed since 2016? Some places that were lying abandoned 10 years ago have now been torn down. Others, though, have been given a new purpose. The mighty might fall, but sometimes they’re resurrected. A long-unused big wheel in Japan has been dismantled, rebuilt and put back into use in Vietnam.

A lighthouse in Denmark has been transported further inland, away from the collapsing shoreline. The site of a shopping mall in Akron, Ohio is still in the retail business, but times change and it’s now an Amazon distribution centre.

Canfranc Station never saw the passenger numbers for which it had been designed. In fact, in under a decade as a museum curiosity it received more visitors than it ever had passengers. Perhaps its time as a museum piece was its heyday? Or perhaps not. In 2023, it reopened as a luxury hotel. 

Varosha, too, is opening up – at least if you have a Turkish passport. And today Battersea Power Station is a retail and residential hub. Busy, clean and useful, certainly – and with many of its art deco features still beautiful. But some things are lost. A space to imagine and a sense of mystery. I’ll miss those.

Read more from Kieron Connolly.

Abandoned Places by Kieron Connolly is out now (Amber Books, £19.99).

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