I’ve written about this before, in my Broken Down article. Old things fascinate me. There’s something both sad and heartening to see the effects of life as time goes on, both human life and all the other forms that we share our spaces with.
Anyway, this is a link repository of some more fascinating photo collections of beat up, run down places and things.
Abandoned Areas (Twitter feed)
Abandoned Places Around the World
Abandoned Places.com (navigation is a bit wonky, but they have more details about the places, which is cool)
Tish Tosh Tesh 
Those are some great links – I love this sort of thing.
The Expoland rings a personal bell. I spent an extremely atmospheric and fascinating day back in the early ’90s exploring the semi-abandoned Seville Expo site, which at the time was still largely open to the public but well into the process of going back to nature. I made another visit a few years later, when a lot of it had been made inaccessible but still no attempt had been made either to tear it down or renovate it. I was in Seville again last year but sadly I didn’t have time to check on it a third time – I believe it’s still mostly in place, though.
We also visited several of the decaying villages in northern Portugal a few years back. The steady exodus of everyone under about 80 years old to the big cities has left rural Portugal strewn with abandoned villages. We were surprised and not a little embarrassed as we explored to find that some of the apparently wrecked buildings were still inhabited. That did make filming the ruined houses feel somewhat ghoulish. Definitely less morally suspect to stick to industrial and commercial decay rather than ooh and aah over what might be someone’s unfortunate circumstance.
I am deeply fascinated by some of the ancient ghost towns of old Greece and Turkey (check google for Cappadocia, Kayaköy, Tlos) or even Italy – Craco is definitely on my list for a trip.
There is something very solemn about such places and humbling too. it puts things in perspective. I already feel that way about the 13th+ century medieval buildings or streets in my hometown; to me it’s comforting to know that no matter how important we think we are, in the end we are all dust specks. 🙂
The Olympics one really frustrates me. BILLIONS of dollars down the drain, while many of the countries are poor or broke or both. I love watching the Olympics but I hate the train wreck they leave behind.
They should have the Olympics in one place every 4 years to save the waste of money. OR bare minimum, have them run 3x per venue (or something).
It tarnishes the whole spirit of the games.
bhagpuss, indeed, it’s not idea to gawk at someone’s troubled life. I ran into a little bit of this when I went out to Eureka for my photo expedition. It’s a semi-ghost town, with a couple hundred people in it still. We drove around a bit, looking for great things to take photos of, but tried to avoid the populated areas. Didn’t want to be obnoxious. Luckily, there was a big event in town, so the locals had opened up an old mining facility that’s usually closed, so we were able to get some shots there. Talked a bit with the guys there, too, and that was really good. They saw that we were there with respect and interest, and we got to talk for a while about mining and how the machinery worked. Some fascinating stories, really.
Syl, yes, if you can be open to it, there’s definitely a humbling aspect to these places. Not just gaining perspective of how insignificant we can be to the world’s function, but also a sense of time and history. The people who came before us are a little more real when you can see what they did (or didn’t do) with their hands and tools.
Isey, yeah, that’s another bit of perspective that could use more examination. It’s one thing to have an amusement park go dark after a decent life span, like the Nara Dreamland, but it’s quite another to have a place like the Sarajevo Olympic park fall out of focus in the inevitably short order. That one in particular, as well as the Germany site, really underscore the fleeting nature of the goodwill of the ‘Games.
On the one hand, though, I like that the Olympics are held in different places, for the variety of the terrain-based events. That said, ice rink and track events are good almost anywhere, so I don’t care where those happen. And yes, on the other hand, the expense of these things and their short life really is kind of… dumb.
I think it would be a hard sell to have one place for the Olympics, though. Too many geopolitical interests at work. I’d be happy with the Winter Olympics always being in Greenland (Antarctica is too cold) and the Summer Olympics in Greece, maybe, to honor the history… but I doubt that it would happen.
Another great place is the Isle of Grain.
There’s a Napoleonic battery in the River Thames (51.451542, 0.731199) which can reached at low-tide via a causeway. I never walked out there before but there’s plenty of photos taken from it.
I remember Grain Fort (51.457417, 0.719693) from childhood. We used to get big sheets of cardboard and slide down from the gun emplacements towards the courtyard (http://www.kenthistoryforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=1204.45 – picture 4). The courtyard is filled in now but the fort still exists underneath the earthworks (http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/g/grain_fort/index.shtml)
Of course, the SS Richard Montgomery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery) still lies in shallow water with its 1400 tonnes of WW2 munitions. Hopefully, they’ll stay stable for a long time