The Countries that Dont Exist, by David Robson

When I first see Nick Middleton, he is surrounded by globes and atlases showing the most exotic places on the planet. We are in the basement of Stanfords, London’s largest travel bookshop, visited by such intrepid explorers as Florence Nightingale, Ernest Shackleton and Ranulph Fiennes.

Middleton, however, is here to talk about countries missing from the vast majority of books and maps for sale here. He calls them the “countries that don’t exist”, but although their names may seem fantastical – Atlantium, Christiania, and Elgaland-Vargaland – they are all real places, occupied by fervidly patriotic citizens. In fact, you have almost certainly, unknowingly, visited one.

The globe, it turns out, is full of small (and not so small) regions that have all the trappings of a real country – a fixed population, a government, a flag, and a currency. Some can even issue you a biometric passport. Yet for various reasons they are not allowed representatives in the United Nations, and are ignored on most world maps.

Middleton, a geographer at the University of Oxford, has now charted these hidden lands in his new book, An Atlas of Countries that Don’t Exist (Macmillan, 2015). Flicking through its pages, it feels like you have entered a parallel world with a vibrant, forgotten history and a rich culture.

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Into the Underworld: The Hackney Underworld, by Iain Sinclair

They dig and the earth is sweet. The Hackney Hole is eight square metres, straight down through the lawn of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered brick. The proud stub of the square tower is all that remains of Hackney’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and screeching, the mechanical gouging that attends the uncivil engineering projects that carve so recklessly through the tarmac and concrete and clay of this loudly regenerated fiefdom. And down again through the pipes and wires of the utility companies who treat their cone-protected pits as privileged art installations and block off junctions and towpaths for unspecified months, as an oversubscribed militia in sour yellow tabards retreat to their all-day breakfasts and tabloid-insulated Portakabins. By way of contrast, the lawn-despoilers initiated their modest project at the summer solstice, before returning every grain of soil, with willing volunteers, in October. One of those who went down into the pit spoke of falling asleep every night to the clatter of helicopters ‘circling the milky sky of Hackney’. She relished, by contrast, the silence of the burrow, and the 'damp, perfumed scent' of the living earth that held her firm in a clammy poultice. ‘I felt cradled by this bare soil,’ Chiara Ambrosio, a filmmaker and anthropologist, told me, ‘contained and absorbed by it, a place of origin and convergence.’

When the surface of the world is so overloaded with competing narratives, with shrill boasts hung from every blue fence and plastered over buses and police cars and refuse trucks, there is an understandable impulse to go underground. Oligarchs and overcompensated money market raiders, Premier League footballers and their agents have burrowed under Chelsea and Kensington for generations, commissioning Dr No fantasies of swimming pools and cinemas and state of the art gymnasia in which no uninvited civilian will ever set foot. These windowless sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify.

And now, without fanfare, the domestic mining fetish has arrived in Hackney. I visited Wilberforce Road, a generously proportioned artery running south from Finsbury Park. This is a transitional zone of large mid-Victorian properties divided into flats. I noticed a Methodist church with a wood-faced turret and a selection of hostels for backpacking passerines. But despite such awkward neighbours, and a degree of spillage from Finsbury Park kerb-crawlers, and the all too evident desperation of bruised addict-prostitutes, Wilberforce Road throbs with earth-shuddering excavations. Estate agents are busily promoting hikes in achieved selling prices, while encouraging the neurotic impulse to regard your home as a volatile asset. The canny speculator should be alert for the optimum moment to cash in. Three-bed flats are on offer at £750,000. The average rent in the street is calculated at £1666 per month. Inspired by this febrile vision, householders dig. There are seven basement excavations in progress. Wilberforce Road is unlisted and schemes for enlarging properties are waved through in the mistaken belief that more housing units are being created. Specialist earth removers mask their activities behind blocky grey sheds. Which prove to be the ideal surface for protesting graffiti: no excavation! ten more years. no more excavating in wilberforce. Mining operations can take as long as a year to complete. Giant compressors thump and thunder. Security guards lurk, bored and edgy, warning off casual photographers. Backs have been torn from properties, and cavernous pits revealed. Plagues of disturbed rats are on the march.

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Big Trouble In Big China: Ghost Cities Of China Reviewed, by Stephen Lee Naish

The rapid rise of China as one of the world's economic powerhouses has been astonishing to witness: Due to the sheer volume of exportable goods produced within the country, and the largest labor force in the world, China has been given the unofficial status of the world's factory. However this slightly derogatory and naive term is becoming more and more redundant as China is hastily being transformed beyond recognition from a production-based society to a consumerist one. The World Bank states that:

Since initiating market reforms in 1978, China has shifted from a centrally planned to a market based economy and experienced rapid economic and social development. GDP growth averaging about 10 percent a year has lifted more than 500 million people out of poverty

This is a truly a remarkable accomplishment in economic reform, yet has not been without its shortcomings to the general populace. High inequality is widespread, environmental concerns and sustainability is a major concern. One of the other aspects of China's growth has been the mounting need/desire to increase its urban spaces as more and more rural communities up sticks and move to the cities to partake in the economic boom. China has put into practice a colossal programme of urban renewal and expansion as well as creating brand new cities from the ground up.

When the Communist Party came to power in 1949 there were 69 cities, today that number has leapt to 658 cities of various population densities. No civilisation in history has built so much in such a short space of time. Yet the majority of these new constructions remain virtually empty. Towers of apartment buildings with no tenants. Shopping malls, and offices without shoppers or workers, sports stadiums with no home teams. China is building pristine virgin cities that no one has yet to touch. Why is this happening? Could China be building these metropolises in preparation for a mass external migration as it surpasses the West as the world's economic power?

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The Eeriness of the English Countyside, by Robert Macfarlane

Writers and artists have long been fascinated by the idea of an English eerie – ‘the skull beneath the skin of the countryside’. But for a new generation this has nothing to do with hokey supernaturalism – it’s a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears.

Ninety years ago this spring, MR James published one of his most unsettling ghost stories, “A View from a Hill”. It opens on a hot June afternoon, when a Cambridge academic called Fanshawe arrives at the house of his friend Squire Richards, deep in the south-west of England. Richards proposes an evening walk to a nearby hilltop, from where they can “look over the country”. Fanshawe asks if he can borrow some binoculars. After initial hesitation, Richards agrees, and gives Fanshawe a smooth wooden box. It contains, he explains, a pair of unusually heavy field-glasses, made by a local antiquary named Baxter, who died under mysterious circumstances a decade or so earlier. In opening the box, Fanshawe cuts his finger on one corner, drawing blood.

So the two men walk up to the viewpoint, where they stop to survey the “lovely English landscape” spread out beneath them: “green wheat, hedges and pasture-land”, “scattered cottages” and the steam-plume of the last train. The smell of hay is in the air. There are “wild roses on bushes hard by”. It is the pinnacle of the English pastoral.

But then Fanshawe raises the binoculars to his eyes – and that “lovely landscape” is disturbingly disrupted. Viewed through the glasses, a distant wooded hilltop becomes a treeless “grass field”, in which stands a gibbet, from which hangs a body. There is a cart containing other men near to the gibbet. People are moving around on the field. Yet when Fanshawe takes the binoculars from his eyes, the gibbet vanishes and the wood returns. Up, eerie; down, cosy. Up, corpse; down, copse. He explains it away as a trick of the midsummer light.

From there, though, the story takes further sinister turns. The next day Fanshawe bicycles out to Gallows Hill, as it is called locally, to investigate the illusion. In the wood on the hilltop, he becomes convinced that there is someone watching him from the thicket, and “not with any pleasant intent”. Panicking, he flees.

Eventually the grim secret of the binoculars is revealed. Baxter had filled their barrels with a fluid derived by boiling the bones of hanged men, whose bodies he had plundered from the graves on Gallows Hill, formerly a site of execution. In looking through the field-glasses, Fanshawe was “looking through dead men’s eyes”, and summoning violent pasts into visible being. Prospect was a form of retrospect; Baxter’s macabre optics revealed the skull beneath the skin of the English countryside.

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Arthur Machen: The Sounds From Beyond The Veil, from The London Sound Survey

ADVENTURES MADE EARLY in life can go on to define intellectual careers and reputations. Darwin was 22 when he set off on The Beagle. T. E. Lawrence built a personal mythos from his experiences as a young officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916–18. The anthropologist Margaret Mead was 27 when her book Coming of Age in Samoa was published, while Napoleon Chagnon spent his twenties studying the Yanonamo people, sometimes introducing himself to a new village by leaping into its central clearing with his face daubed in war paint, waving a shotgun.

The Welsh-born mystic and writer Arthur Machen moved to London in 1881 when he was in his late teens, a good age for the kind of long exploratory walks which can bring on a trance-like state of fatigue. He lodged briefly in south London before moving to Turnham Green, then Notting Hill Gate. With De Quincey’s opium-powered London wanderings sometimes in mind, Machen began first to explore the north and west of the city. His autobiographical works, such as Far Off Things (1922), suggest he gathered enough thoughts on London and its hinterlands during these expeditions to inform the rest of his literary career.

Machen’s descriptions of sounds often occur in the absence of seeing what’s making them. In The Terror (1917), a part of the Welsh countryside is haunted by an eerie, distant moaning, which is later revealed as people crying for help up the chimney flue of a barricaded cottage. A Fragment of Life (1899) features a nature spirit less benign than Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which whistles unseen at a couple walking in the fields near Totteridge. The confrontation is a foretaste of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now:

Still, she felt it was no good bothering her head over what couldn’t be made out or explained anyway, and she was just settling down, when one Sunday evening it began all over again, and worse things happened. The whistling followed them just as it did before, and poor aunt set her teeth and said nothing to uncle, as she knew he would only tell her stories, and they were walking on, not saying a word, when something made her look back, and there was a horrible boy with red hair, peeping through the hedge just behind, and grinning. She said it was a dreadful face, with something unnatural about it, as if it had been a dwarf, and before she had time to have a good look, it popped back like lightning, and aunt all but fainted away.

Part of H.P. Lovecraft’s acknowledged debt to Machen also lies in hearing without seeing. Well before Lovecraft’s half-human ululations emanated from somewhere below ground, Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895) has Francis Leicester ingest a restorative white powder from a chemist, only to undergo a horrible physical degeneration. The process takes time, however, as his sister finds out:

“Francis, Francis,” I cried, “for heaven’s sake answer me. What is the horrible thing in your room? Cast it out, Francis, cast it from you!” I heard a noise as of feet shuffling slowly and awkwardly, and a choking, gurgling sound, as if some one was struggling to find utterance, and then the noise of a voice, broken and stifled, and words that I could scarcely understand.

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Staging Disorder Exhibition, words by Debika Ray

An exhibition of photography depicts the eerie, artificial towns used to train the police and military for conflict

Photographs of the fake buildings, streets and interiors created to train police and miltary forces to deal with conflict situations are on display in an exhibition that began this week.
Staging Disorder at the London College of Communication includes images from seven series of photographs that examine a unique type of architecture where form is predicated on fear rather than function.
Among these are photographs by Sarah Pickering of the locations used to train officers in the British police who deal with terrorism, riots and protests. The largest of these, where she shot most of her images, is Denton, a series of large-scale backdrops and fake streets that simulate a stark, mid-sized city – complete with a football stadium, a nightclub and a Tube station. The apparent order and cleanliness of the set is in sharp contrast to the inherent chaos of the scenarios for which the officers are training.
Claudio Hils’ Red Land Blue Land was shot at training grounds for German troops in Senne, North Rhine-Westphalia. During manoeuvres, the term “Red Land” means enemy territory and “Blue Land” denotes friendly areas. Traces of military activity, such as targets in the shape of people, emphasise the emptiness and lifelessness of the terrain.
Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg photographed Chicago, a fake Arab town in the Negev desert built by the Israeli Defense Force for urban combat training. Its history has mirrored the story of the conflict with Palestine: During the war in Lebanon, its streets were filled with abandoned cars, imitating areas of Beirut; during the first and second intifada, its concrete walls were covered with Arabic graffiti reminiscent of Gaza city and an area was built to simulate the refugee camps of the occupied territories; during the first Gulf war, American special forces had their first taste of the Middle East in the artificial town.

Staging Disorder runs until 12 March and the LCC in Elephant and Castle, London

The Art of Micronations: Rebellion through Creative Land Conquests, by Meg van Huygen

Once the domain of only the most determined of oddballs, micronations are a more common phenomenon since the advent of the internet. These days, you don't even need a physical territory to declare yourself a head of state — you only need a website — and even if you do have a property to claim, a populace of fellow oddballs to be your country's citizens is a lot easier to come by when you have access to the whole world's supply.

The difference between a nation and a micronation is a small but important one: A micronation is one that's not officially recognized by world governments. Also, a mcironation is usually, but not strictly, a secession from an established nation. Beyond that, there are two general conventions that define the conditions of statehood: The Montevideo Convention requires a) a territory, b) a permanent population, c) a government, and d) the facility to enter into discussions with other states, while the constitutive theory of statehood adds a fifth criterion: the recognition of the rest of the world as a separate state, which disqualifies the vast majority of micronations.

Either way, if we're counting virtual space, i.e., on the internet, all of this is a lot easier to attain and document online than it used to be. But back in the day, it took some hardcore chutzpah, creativity, and organizational skills to pull this feat off — emphasis on the creativity. It's no surprise, then, that so many of the first micronations were established by artists. Here are a few of the most original ones we've come across.

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also:

The Weirdest Micronations That Have Ever Existed, by Vincze Miklós here

Infiltrating London: subterranean exploration in the british capital, by Darmon Richter

London is a complicated place. It is a melting pot of cultures and races, a nexus for trade and travel, which archaeologists believe to have been occupied for more than 6,000 years. With every passing age, with each new society that has laid a claim to this settlement on the Thames Estuary, London’s roots have grown deeper and deeper into the soil of England.

The result today is a multifaceted and wholly organic entity, one in which Roman ruins rub shoulders with Victorian ice wells, between historic catacombs and contemporary rail tracks. London's layers spread out deep, far, and wide beneath the limited surface space. Beneath the paved streets is a tangled labyrinth of storm drains and sewers, subterranean rivers, the booming network of underground train tunnels, a warren of wartime bunkers, and deep level shelter facilities. Then, beneath that, there are areas of new bore. Even now London’s roots are searching deeper still, pushing further into the Earth’s crust to make room for high-speed rail connections and advanced data delivery conduits.

It should be no surprise then that London is something of a mecca for urban explorers. However, London is not Eastern Europe, where regime changes have left many underground facilities obsolete, their bulkhead doors hanging open and inviting to those who would dare to peek beneath the surface. This is not Australia, where explorers are discouraged from entering the extensive storm drain networks largely for their own benefit, on account of the many deadly creatures which thrive in these dank and disconnected places.

In a city of 8.3 million people, there is limited room for abandonment. London moves quickly, and there is little time to forget. Almost every inch of London’s subterranean realm still serves a purpose — from cable runs to data storage vaults — and those that don’t are simply waiting to be allotted new roles in the substructure of the capital.

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