Every year up to twenty people die completely alone in Amsterdam. There are no friends or family to prepare their funeral or mourn over the body. Sometimes these people are illegal migrants, drug mules, or simply people who for one reason or another, c...

Wedge Island is located in a secluded spot on the rugged, windswept Indian Ocean coastline 170kms north of the Western Australian capital city Perth. Fifty years ago, crayfisherman and holiday makers became squatters erecting corrugated tin shacks on ...

Almost weekly there are stories in the British press about backlogs in the UK asylum system, and the pressure this puts on asylum seekers. No-one in the UK is more marginalised than asylum seekers who have not had their applications accepted, but not b...

In TRAFFIC ISLANDS:DIVIDING LINES we meet denizens of three islands in the US – researchers prowling one of New York City's famous streets, a man living on the traffic islands of Washington, DC, and a Maryland family that turned a rural streetscape int...

From Harbour to Hotspot : The atmosphere in Amsterdam is largely characterised by water. In fact, a large part of the city consists of century old islands, all man-made. KNSM-Island, Java-Island, Sporenburg, the Cattle-market. This group of islands, pe...

Across the Water : Fair Isle is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the British Isles. It is rocky and too windy for trees to grow on, one of the Shetland Islands way north of the Scottish mainland, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the North Sea....

Death Diminishes Me: When John Donne hopefully asserted that no man is an island, he couldn’t have foreseen the agony of isolation suffered by those living with the HIV virus. Add guilt, abandonment, memory, anger and the wearing effects of a serious i...

The Peakist : While John Donne said that no man is an island, Lloyd Morcom sometimes feels like one. An island in his own community and his own country.

He knows that people get sick of too much bad news. But he also feels he must change his life dr...

My Life So Far : The story told by the young people of Alert Bay, a remote island on the west coast of Canada, is both familiar and unique. Like most people who come of age in a small community, Alert Bay's youth is torn between staying and venturing ...

CHUNG KING MANSIONS: a Work in Progress

Hong Kong's Chung King Mansions is an infamous tenement building, which has a colourful past, present and who knows what future. Built as residential flats in the early 60s, these days it is a haven for immigr...