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Category / Nostalgia

The Bay of Abandoned Hotels

As summer winds down and holidaymakers swap the beach for their real lives, hotels will inevitably begin to empty of their guests and resorts will slowly become ghost towns until the next season. But very few resorts will get as ghostly as the Kupari luxury resort in Croatia, which hasn’t seen any paying guests since…

Wish You Were Here! The Golden Age of Holidays at Home on the English Riviera

Picture the scene: tricolour flags line the yacht-filled harbour, art-deco hotels dazzle the streets at night, celebrities flurry to villas hidden along the hillside that overlook lanes filled with chic cafés, where colourful tourists sip wine and smoke cigarettes at small bistro tables, while vintage cars are judged during the annual concours d’élégance and beautiful…

Harlem’s Forgotten Fight to Save Africa’s Last Uncolonised Nation from Mussolini

Harlem, New York, the summer of 1935. Years before the United States or even Allied Europe has entered World War II. Large crowds of African Americans are gathering around a registration desk, volunteering to take on a fascist Italian dictator who is soon to become Hitler’s fiercest collaborator. No doubt, Black Americans have enough battles…

Like Dalí, She Should Have Been a Household Name for Surrealist Art

She became famous overnight with a strange furry teacup that mesmerised the art world in a way that no woman had done before. In a time before shock-seeking art became the norm, Meret Oppenheim was a pioneer; a force of nature who had all the Surrealists of Paris speaking her name, even though she didn’t…

The Dandy Suit that America Banned and Caused a Riot

You know the zoot suit. It’s the suit that bad guys are usually wearing in comical mid-century gangster movies, but there’s much more to this story than a stereotype. In the 1940s and 50s, zoot suits were worn by Mexican-American hipsters who embraced the flamboyant oversized style of dress to express their desire for freedom from discrimination and racism as an underclass. The zoot suiters became a…

The All-Black Utopian Ghost City that Lost its Soul

In the heart of what was North Carolina’s old tobacco and cotton-field industry, lies the remains of Soul City, an unrealised utopia born in the midst of America’s 1970s urban crisis, intended to encourage black empowerment in a new all-African American planned community. Bankrolled by Nixon’s Republican government, “built by black people and for black people”, Soul City was projected to…

The Secret Life of a Bond Girl

Guest article by Jamie Quiroz Ah, the Bond Girl. She purrs when she speaks, and always in an accent of indeterminate origin. She jets between the world’s most photogenic locales and underground bunkers. And she occasionally double-crosses lovers, because she can. Ursula Andress of Dr. No with Ian Fleming in Jamaica, 1962 When James Bond…

Vintage Muse du Jour: Princess Elizabeth of Toro

Today, we’re formally inviting you to shift your gaze to a lesser-known royal, deserving of her own spotlight: Elizabeth of Toro, the Ugandan Princess, lawyer, actor, top model, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador to the US, Germany and the Vatican in the 1960s. Her life reads like a trophy wall, and that’s only half…

In Defence of Clutter: The American Castle of a Renaissance Hoarder

Forget the great and gaudy Hearst Castle – why don’t they talk about Fonthill Castle? Now that’s a house worth seeing. Some might call him America’s first hoarder, but for any aspiring collector or lover of eclectic arts, Pennsylvania’s most underrated treasure is an astonishing visual treat at every turn, telling the story of a…

For Sale: The Victorian Butcher Shop You Never Knew You Needed

So generously preserved of its original features, you can almost imagine a portly butcher emerging from his back room to ask whether you want the Sirloin cut or Tenderloin. And yet this “rare survival” in North London has managed to find new life as a wonderful two-bedroom home with a kitchen and front room to…

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