Credit: Gary Stearman
The Old Un finds peerless beauty in ruins
Brighton West Pier is one of the stars of a new book, Atlas of Forgotten Places: Journey to Abandoned Destinations from around the Globe, by Travis Elborough.
The elegiac charm of ruins is movingly evoked, from an incomplete Polish nuclear power plant to the deserted Hellinikon Olympic Complex in Athens, built for the 2004 Olympics.
Most stirring of all is Brighton West Pier (built in 1866), with its marooned lines of cast-iron columns leading to the skeletal pleasure dome out at sea, set alight by arsonists in 2003.
