Here’s an Instagram Account dedicated to finding Forgotten French Ghost Signs

Instagram has become one of my favourite resources, probably because I’ve trained my digital eye to know exactly what I’m looking for while scrolling endlessly through accounts, allowing me to pinpoint more places on my wanderlust map like a visual mood board of things I love. Make sense? Well anyway, it’s a great travel tool and…

Closed Shops

This morning I woke up early thinking I’d have a productive errands day; get to the gym, run across town to pick up those shoes for my brother’s upcoming wedding, pick up my dry cleaning– all the little things you don’t really feel like doing on the weekend. And then of course I realised that the…

Lost Facades of the 1970s Anti-Walmart

Does anyone remember the American retail chain BEST Products? The last store disappeared in 1997 after forty years in business selling cheap home furnishings, consumer electronics, jewellery, housewares, toys from their catalog showrooms. Their retail concept might not have worked so well, but their architecture in the 1970s and early 80s made shopping trips to the strip…

No Bookshelf is Complete without the Bible of American Abandonment

If you own one book on abandoned photography, it should be this one. I’ve been following Eric Hulubow’s work over the years, he was one of the first urbex photographers I discovered who spurred my obsession with forgotten places and took me further down the rabbit hole. His book, Abandoned – America’s Vanishing Landscape is a comprehensive…

The Forbidden Road of the French Alps

It might look like a traveler’s paradise, but this picturesque road is counted amongst the most dangerous in the world. Known as les Grands Goulets and built between 1843 and 1854, the legendary route is carved out of the cliffs of Vercors, a massif of mountains in the Rhône alpes region of France. After 156 years…

Welcome to the Saddest 1980s Mall in America

Think of the funnest place where you hung out as a teenager, when you were first allowed to go out with your friends on your own and pick up the latest chart-topping single. Now imagine it looking as sad and empty as this. Meg Stefanac from Pittsburgh, a former high school newspaper and yearbook photographer from the class…

China’s First Stock Exchange is a now a Forgotten Dusty Apartment Building

Tucked away in an inconspicuous alley of one of the last functioning old-town neighborhoods in Beijing, hiding in the shadows of the historic city gate that once guarded the direct entry into the imperial city, lies the dusty forgotten shell of the first Beijing Stock Exchange. For a country that has one of the world’s largest stock markets, I couldn’t…

Inside the Deserted Mansions of an American Heiress

She had three sprawling luxury homes at her disposal, but Huguette Clark chose to spend the last 20 years of her life holed up in a New York hospital room. Her father became as rich as Rockefeller from mining copper and founded the city of Las Vegas, but Huguette wasn’t your average American heiress. No one…

A Prime Minister’s Abandoned Beirut Mansion

There’s one type of home you don’t really expect to find crumbling in an abandoned and decaying state– such as the ones that belonged to heads of state or government, for example. But when a country tears itself to shreds in a civil war, I suppose we can begin to understand how the upkeep of an exiled…

Beat Boxing in a Condemned Paris Train Station

Where the smoke rises into the Paris night by the old sleeping railway tracks and crumbling walls blanketed in graffiti, the sound of music pumps from beneath us, luring our ears underground… Let’s slip behind the fence (the flimsy string is just begging to be untied). In a shivery and dark old storage facility, strange things await… Mysterious…