Abandoned Palaces

by Michael Kerrigan

Published 14 July 2019
Built to last, built to impress, built with style and grandeur - it is all the more remarkable when the most ostentatious of buildings fall into disrepair and become ruins. From imperial residences and aristocratic estates to hotels and urban mansions, Abandoned Palaces tells the stories behind dilapidated structures from all around the world.
From ancient Roman villas to the French colonial hill station in Cambodia that was one of the final refuges of the Khmer Rouge, the book charts the fascinating decline of what were once the homes and holiday resorts of the most wealthy. Ranging from crumbling hotels in the Catskill Mountains or in Mozambique to grand mansions in Taiwan, and from an unfinished Elizabethan summerhouse to a modern megalomaniac's estate too expensive ever to be completed, the reasons for the abandonment of these buildings include politics, bankruptcy, personal tragedies, natural and man-made disasters, as well as changing tastes and fashions.
With 150 outstanding colour photographs exploring more than 100 hauntingly beautiful locations, Abandoned Palaces is a brilliant and moving pictorial examination of worlds we have left behind.

A rusting anti-aircraft fort in the North Sea. A German submarine base in France. A Flak tower in a Viennese park - more than 70 years after the end of World War II, its legacy can still be seen from Europe to Japan.
World War II Abandoned Places explores more than 100 bunkers, pillboxes, submarine bases, forts and gun emplacements from the North Sea to Okinawa. Included are defensive structures, such as the Maginot Line on France's eastern border with Germany, Germany's own western and eastern border defences, and the Atlantic Wall, the German-built bunkers and pillboxes on the coast from Denmark down to Brittany. The book also includes both Hitler's and Himmler's Eastern Front bunkers in Poland.
But beyond the military installations, the book explores the ruins of concentration camps, the empty village of Oradour-Sur-Glane, Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden and the dilapidated Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, among other non-military places.
With 150 outstanding colour photographs, World War II Abandoned Places is a brilliant pictorial examination of both the military and non-military legacy of the conflict.