The 10 best ... famous graves | Culture | The Observer. The view from the top of the Shard: London panorama of sights and sounds – interactive | Art and design. Bought for £1, the mysterious tower that inspired JRR Tolkien | Society. It wasn't the most promising of pitches: when Ben Bradley suggested that a homeless charity buy a derelict, windblown Georgian tower in a poor district of Birmingham he expected, and got, some blank looks. The building is spectacular but perilous. It sways slightly in strong wind and its seven rooms – one on each storey – are the size of a hearth rug. But, said Bradley: "As it turned out, my CEO is a Tolkien fanatic, and so the deal was done. " The Trident Reach the People charity paid £1, and became proud owners of one of the oldest and most eccentric structures in Birmingham, a building better known in Japan than it is on the other side of the city.
The eyeball-shaped windows at the top of Perrott's Folly look down in one direction on where JRR Tolkien lived as a child, and in the opposite direction on the Oratory, where he went to school. The folly stood at the heart of a magnificent park when it was built by a local eccentric, John Perrott, in 1758. Stairway1. 24 hours in pictures | News. In the mirror of river" by Мария Есакова. WoW theme park. The Secret Annex Online. London's Shard - video review | UK news. Battleship Island: Japan's Ultimate Ghost Town (where Skyfall 007 James Bond was filmed) Battleship Island - Japan's Rotting Metropolis. These days the only things that land on Hashima Island are the shits of passing seagulls. An hour or so’s sail from the port of Nagasaki, the abandoned island silently crumbles. A former coal mining facility owned by Mitsubishi Motors, it was once the most densely populated place on earth, packing over 13,000 people into each square kilometre of its residential high-risers.
It operated from 1887 until 1974, after which the coal industry fell into decline and the mines were shut for good. With their jobs gone and no other reason to stay in this mini urban nightmare, almost overnight the entire population fled back to the mainland, leaving most of their stuff behind to rot. Today it is illegal to go anywhere near the place as it's beyond restoration and totally unsafe. The Japanese Government aren’t keen to draw unwanted attention to this testament to the hardship of the country’s post-war industrial revolution either. We explored the empty classrooms of the island’s huge school.