Battleship Island

Here’s another gallery of awesome threshold spaces – thanks to Iain Maloney for pointing this one out to me. This is Hashima Island in Japan, also known as Battleship Island. It was used as a base for extracting and processing coal from the sea bed, and for housing the miners. The Mitsubishi corporation owned the island for almost a century, but the mines became unprofitable as coal was increasingly superseded by petroleum. Mitsubishi abandoned the place in 1974. Since then, the concrete has crumbled, the balconies have fallen from the buildings and plants have erupted in the courtyards. It’s an astonishing, ghostly space.

The sea will take its own.