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Category / Nostalgia

The Day the Shorts got Shorter

After this most deepest and darkest of winters (aren’t they always), what I’m more than ready for the sort of weather that just makes you want to burst out of the house and run the streets in short shorts. This is basically what is happening in these photographs I fished out of the LIFE archives… With LIFE’s…

So in Albania, the Number of Abandoned Bunkers is Kind of a Problem

Once upon a time, during the Cold War, Albania’s paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha forced his country to build 700,000 bunkers, one for every four citizens. Today, the country is still trying to figure out what to do with his concrete mushrooms that have become synonymous with the landscape. A number of them have been creatively…

When Native Americans Took Back Alcatraz

Fifty years ago, their revolution emerged like a Phoenix from the ashes. It was 1969, and a fire had just destroyed the San Francisco American Indian Center, which had proved an indispensable resource for over 30,000 members of the urban indigenous population. With no other options, local activists had to get radical. They found their…

Discovering the Patroness of Paris Hiding in a Little-Known Church

For centuries, the Parisian church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont has silently peered over shoulder of the famous Pantheon temple in the Latin Quarter, keeping its secrets to itself. It is one of those spaces– and there are many in Paris – that often ends-up as a footnote in the guidebooks, playing second fiddle to the “must-sees.” If you walk…

The Wondrous Search for the Lost Pink and White Terraces

“This is New Zealand’s Titanic,” said one scientist who dedicated several years of his career to searching for the 8th Wonder of the World – thought to be lost forever – destroyed by a massive volcanic eruption in 1886 that devastated the natural landscape. Known to the Māori people as “the Fountain of the Clouded…

The Ghost Shops of the Champs Elysées

It’s supposed to be “La Plus Belle Avenue du Monde” (the most beautiful avenue in the world), at least that’s what they keep telling the tourists. The Champs-Élysées has earned its reputation as one of the world’s most famous streets, a highly established Parisian centre of commerce, as well as a source of national pride. But…

Time Travel to the Real-Life Peaky Blinders Village

Peaky Blinders fans, hold onto your flat caps. In the heart of “Black Country”, an area of the West Midlands that became Britain’s own furnace, powering the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, an entire 26 acre village exists for you and I to experience a day in the life of Tommy Shelby… The Black…

This 1920s Bauhaus Ballet is a Serious Trip

This is not pyschedelic performance art from the 1960s, this is ballet. Throughout history there are works of art that stand out as somehow atemporal and this choreography created in 1922 for the Theatre of Bauhaus, is one such artwork… Featuring astonishing brightly coloured, asymmetrical and cumbersome costumes, this ballet broke so far with convention of that…

A Hidden Island Treasure of Lost Antique Machines

It’s a place you’ll only find if you’re searching for ghosts of the past. I saw it flash past the corner of my eye as we whizzed through the sleepy village streets of Gozo, the Maltese island south of Sicily, before siesta’s quietest hour. I hurled my head out of our battered 4×4 jeep window to catch a fleeting glimpse…

Exploring Tommy Suharto’s Ghost Hotel

Of all the stories of crazed dictators and corrupt regimes built on nepotism, the Suharto legacy might just be the most scandalous. The youngest son to one of the most brutal leaders in recent history, Tommy Suharto’s tale fits somewhere on the same shelf as Pablo Escobar’s and Kim Jung Un’s. Playboy embezzler, convicted murderer,…

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