1. Urbex Session, castle road trip by Marie & Raphael
The Marquise has left her castle, and the beautiful, abandoned residence languishes in its overgrown park. Luckily, two young urban explorers have embarked on an extraordinary challenge: to breathe life back into these forgotten worlds whose history, real or imagined, evokes unsettling feelings. Join them on an unusual road trip that takes them from bourgeois houses to manor houses, and from country estates to palaces, through images and stories, discover incredible buildings, sometimes intact but silenced. Exceptional photographs with meticulous aesthetics reveal the opulent past, the extravagances, and the mysteries of these ghost castles. These vanished worlds tell the story of our society. They bear witness to the sometimes tragic fate of abandoned French heritage and raise questions about its preservation.
2. Urbex, a world heritage site by MonsieurKurtis
With MonsieurKurtis, urban exploration is a journey without borders. Camera and projectors slung over his shoulder, he takes us on an unusual visual journey to discover inaccessible places, whether abandoned or not. Sites closed to the public, forbidden, or secret—the adventure begins in Lorraine, in his native valley, and continues to the four corners of the globe. There are no boundaries either between rooftops (skyscrapers, bridges, church spires...), ground level (factories, amusement parks, junkyards...), or underground (bunkers, catacombs, mines, subways, quarries...). Inspired by video game artwork, he doesn't hesitate to appropriate the location, staging characters and creating fantastical or surreal atmospheres. With this book, the author forever inscribes 50 places on the world heritage of urbex, in 180 prodigious photos supported by texts that reveal the architectural and historical interest of the sites.
3. Urbex World by Jonk
Traveling the world in search of dreams and poetry... From the mythical ghost town of Pripyat in the Chernobyl exclusion zone to the sand-covered houses of Kolmanskop in Namibia, and the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Jonk, an adventurous photographer and urban exploration enthusiast, takes us on a journey through this travelogue, discovering forbidden zones and ruins ravaged by time, where nature reclaims its rights. Prisons, train stations, palaces, military buildings—discover thirty-five sites abandoned by human society and reclaimed by the dreamlike magic of dereliction.
4. Remains of a Forgotten World by Kieron Connolly
Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if humanity were to disappear? The photographs in this book offer a glimpse. Much faster than we could imagine, grass would carpet the roads, trees would grow through buildings, and wildlife would return to haunt our cities. Nature would reclaim its territory.
From the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to the Aral Sea, from Detroit's ruined theaters to Cold War British bunkers, *Remnants of a Forgotten World* unveils the fascinating stories of ghost towns, submerged shopping malls, amusement parks with rusted rides, and abandoned railways. Through more than 150 spectacular and astonishing photographs, embark on a journey to the heart of these sites forgotten by humankind.
5. 100 breathtaking urban exploration locations by Eloi Rousseau
Orphanages, churches, disused factories, amusement parks, hospitals, cemeteries… All over the world, abandoned sites, left to nature, taken over by street artists, rediscovered by urban explorers…
This book offers 100 adventures to discover these amazing places where time seems to have stood still…
6. Urbex: 50 secret and abandoned places in France by Timothy Hannem
To become an urban explorer, all you need is a little daring... Climb a wall, venture into an underpass, push open a simple fence, and everything changes. Forgotten and secret worlds in the heart of the city become playgrounds... right on your doorstep. Orphanage, church, hospital, slaughterhouse, abandoned factory, amusement park, school, cemetery... these abandoned sites are being rediscovered today by urban explorers, these Urbex enthusiasts. This book offers fifty adventures, fifty secret places, some untouched, all deserted by society. Clue by clue, try to locate these unusual sites where time seems to have stood still.
7. France abandoned by David Margaine
Follow in the footsteps of the abandoned steelworks of Gandrange or the closed blast furnaces of Uckange in Lorraine, a spectacular warship graveyard on the Crozon peninsula in Brittany, a forgotten castle in the Paris region, an abandoned sanatorium in the Alps, the remains of a magnificent Art Deco concert hall in the North, a disused hospital in the Southwest, a now-forbidden military fort in the Pyrenees, a closed wine cellar in Normandy...
8. Chernobyl: A Post-Apocalyptic Visit by Laurent Michelot
April 26, 1986. The Chernobyl disaster destroyed countless lives, a city, villages, and an entire region in just a few hours. It was an ecological and human catastrophe that will remain etched in collective memory, and whose scars will take more than nine hundred years to perhaps disappear.
Through a richly illustrated introduction of infographics and period photographs , this book sheds light, for the first time, on the utopian city of Pripyat and the Chernobyl complex, the fatal accident and the attempts to contain the disaster.
Detailed maps of the area allow you to explore the city, its infrastructure, its dwellings, and the surrounding villages.
Archival photographs juxtapose the present and the past, like snapshots, fragments of the lives of the men and women who once lived there.
Laurent Michelot, a passionate photographer, explores these now abandoned places through 150 unpublished photographs .
9. Baikonur: Remnants of the Soviet program
The world is full of very little-known geographical anomalies that are or have often been a source of diplomatic and/or military struggles. Many still exist under the radar and are, or could become, the source of a major international crisis.
Countries that do not really exist, the world's only town that lies entirely underground, a UK hotel room that became Yugoslavian for one day only, an island which is Spanish for six months of the year and French for the other six months, a city which is officially constituted by one single skyscraper, the world's first and only railway that belonged to one country and ran across another, a hotel room whose bedroom is in France and whose bathroom is in Switzerland, Bir Tawil which is one of the very few territories on Earth not claimed by any country, the only place in the world where you can find the so-called counter-enclaves and where in a 20-minute walk around the village you can cross an international border over 50 times at 50 different points...
10. Abandoned Places: Images of a Lost World by Henk van Rensbhergen
Henk van Rensbergen is an airline pilot. He takes advantage of his layovers around the world to indulge his second passion: photographing abandoned places. From a floating ship graveyard in France to a flooded theme park in New Orleans, by way of a sanatorium in Georgia, a forgotten love hotel in Japan, or a palace on an Italian lake, the author seeks the beauty in their desolation and highlights the richness of their decay. This pocket-sized book showcases his most iconic photographs from the last 25 years, taken in around a hundred different locations, including previously unpublished documents and anecdotes.
