From deserted cities and strange settlements to remote islands and underground labyrinths, Atlas of Improbable Places uncovers our planet’s most unique, intriguing and often unknown places. This is the world and its obscurities, displayed like never before.
Accompanied by Alan Horsfield’s stunning, specially commissioned illustrations, Travis Elborough goes on a voyage to the world’s most unlikely and curious locations in search of the mysterious and bizarre, the beautiful and estranged. He explores such unusual and perplexing locations as San Juan in Parangaricuto, a town entirely submerged by lava, and Leap Castle in Ireland – allegedly the world’s most haunted house. Atlas of Improbable Places features Dream Creations, Deserted Destinations, Architectural Oddities, Floating Worlds, Otherworldly Spaces and Subterranean Realms. Spanning centuries and reaching all around the globe, each entry provides key information, wittily observed, and beautiful illustrations that evoke both the habitat and our relationship to it.
As Travis Elborough himself states: “Atlas of Improbable Places is intended as a compendium of unlikely, curious and plain odd locales. The improbability factor, if you will, of each of these places was that they were distinguished by some element of their architecture, natural geography or present or past state of being. Improbability may have been inherent at the beginning, or thrust upon them later or only accrued in recent times, but these places all have fascinating stories to tell us.”
Q/A with the Authors
In curating this curious collection which place did you most delight in (re)discovering?
I had always been intrigued by the Kingdom of Redonda, which might more honestly be said to be a state of the imagination rather than an actual principality. Though the place itself is real enough and lies off Montserrat in the Caribbean Sea, the story of the lineage of its regal title is closer to the stuff of fiction and, indeed, has been employed in at least one novel, and was fascinating to delve into.
How did the idea for the book come about?
As a pop cultural historian I’ve made something of a career attempting to make people aware of the extraordinaries of often quite mundane things, or landscapes. I’ve previously written books about the red London bus, the English seaside and most recently public parks. So some of the impetus of this project was simply to do the complete reverse of that for a change and select a series of quite obviously extraordinary places and tell their individual stories rather than ranging over a single topic for a whole book. And, frankly, who doesn’t love an atlas or a map?
The actual idea for the book really stemmed from conversation in my local pub about certain places just being ‘impossible’. These were primarily confined to stuff like Oxford Street in London on the Saturday afternoon before Xmas. But somehow this led to a lively discussion about what an ‘impossible atlas’ might look like. Or more seriously whether an atlas of impossible places would, by definition, be impossible. What I ultimately salvaged from this bar philosophy session was the vague notion perhaps what the world needed was an atlas of improbable places instead. I await the world’s judgement on this obviously.
Why is the interest in remote and rare places so relevant to today’s traveller?
I think we all know that thanks to cheap(er) air travel and the internet, places that were once the stuff of dreams and improbable to the point of implausibility to our ancestors—Australia itself for one—have become far more accessible and can seem as familiar to us as our own neighbourhoods. And yet if we sometimes worry that our globalised and Google-map enabled world is shrinking, arguably that technology has if anything only helped heighten our appetite for the unusual and the out of the ordinary.
When almost every action we perform online is tracked and all things digital attempt to distance us from the body and physical disintegration, it’s perhaps not so surprising that our fascination with the utterly abandoned, the long unobserved, the decayed and ruined has, for example, increased exponentially. That pictures of a weed-infested factory or rotted mansion in Detroit or St Louis, say, will frequently have their greatest currency on Instagram or other social media sites, only reaffirms rather than contradicts a particular contemporary desire, I believe, to seek out the obscure and unburnished.
How can this book and the inspiration to explore improbable places add value to our understanding of culture and unique landscapes?
Hopefully it does so by describing these places with as much honesty, wit and sensitivity to their characteristics and histories as possible.
Which destination would you most like to visit?
Of the ones in the book I didn’t reach, I think the Pacific island paradise of Palmerston seems most appealing right now, typing this as I am, on an exceedingly dull, damp afternoon in London.
Favourite fascinating fact from the places you explore?
That at Bunker 42, a former cold war communications bunker in Moscow, two gentlemen of mature years are able to earn their daily crust as lookalikes, respectively, of the former Soviet Leaders Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev.
Are there any places not mentioned in the book that you feel warrant a mention?
There were loads, easily enough for a second volume. When I was in Arizona visiting Lake Havasu City I picked up a book from the 1970s about gold rush settlements in the American West that had long since become ghost towns. There were a couple of those I sought out and wanted to include but due to space and the greater improbability factor of some of the other destinations I reluctantly had to omit them.
About the Authors
Travis Elborough has been a freelance writer, author, and cultural commentator for more than a decade. His books include The Bus We Loved, a history of the Routemaster bus; The Long Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records; Wish You Were Here, a survey of the British beside the sea; A Walk In The Park, a loving portrait of our open spaces; and A Traveller’s Year – 365 Days of Travel Writing in Diaries, Journals and Letters. He is a regular contributor to newspapers, magazines and broadcast media including the Guardian and Observer, The Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Oldie, Tate Etc., BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live. Travis lives in London and has been described as “one of Britain’s finest pop cultural historians” by the Guardian.
Alan Horsfield has over thirty years experience as a cartographer. Having started his career at the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, he has created artwork for many publications, most recently as chief cartographer for Reader’s Digest World Atlas. Alan lives in Hampshire.
Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners
By Travis Elborough and Alan Horsfield (Aurum Press • September 2016 • $39.99)
