In 1961 a Japanese showman built his own Disneyland in Nara, complete with a castle, a Matterhorn and a Main Street. For forty-five years it thrilled families, then it sat empty and overgrown for a decade before the bulldozers arrived.
Between Venice and the Lido, a small island once held plague ships, then a hospital and nursing home. It now stands empty, and the ghost stories told about it are much bigger than the documented history.
Inside the flooded crater of an active volcano in Antarctica, rusting oil tanks, an aircraft hangar and a cemetery mark where whalers, then scientists, tried to make a home.
In a granite quarry at Aswan lies the largest obelisk the ancient Egyptians ever attempted. Cracks appeared before it could be freed from the bedrock, and it has been lying there ever since.
A German steamer that ran aground in the fog in 1909 now sits in the sand of Namibia's desert coast, hundreds of metres from the sea it once sailed.
In the 1960s a Canadian engineer bolted two 16-inch naval gun barrels together on the coast of Barbados and fired projectiles more than 90 kilometres into the sky. The project was shut down in 1967, and the gun is still there, rusting.
Behind an ordinary-looking bungalow in the Essex countryside, a 100-yard tunnel leads down to a three-level bunker about 125 feet underground. Built in 1952 as an RAF command centre, it became a regional government headquarters for a nuclear war, and is now a museum.
Before radar, Britain tried to hear the enemy coming. From the First World War to the early 1930s, concrete dishes and walls on the Kent coast gathered the sound of aircraft engines over the Channel. The best preserved stand on an island in a gravel pit near Dungeness.
Built in the late 1960s for a secret US-British radar that never worked, the buildings on Orford Ness were given a second life as a giant medium-wave transmitter. For nearly thirty years its masts carried the BBC World Service across Europe, and now the same site broadcasts Radio Caroline.
On a Pacific island in the Marshall Islands, a concrete dome 115 metres wide covers a crater left by a 1958 US nuclear test, filled with contaminated soil and debris from the whole atoll. It was built by about 4,000 servicemen between 1977 and 1980, it has no floor liner, and the sea is rising around it.
