Cal Flyn (16:45)

Extraordinary … Just when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain – not scenes where man has never trod, but places where he has been and gone … Dazzling - Spectator

Abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place?

Cal Flyn, award winning Scottish author, travelled to the extraordinary places where humans no longer live, or only survive in tiny, precarious numbers.

In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods.

From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, in Islands of Abandonment Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world – and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

In conversation with Rob Edwards

Event sponsored by Baillie Gifford

Click to buy book