Category Archives: Heritage

‘Not everything’s for sale’: Greeks mobilise as new hotels obscure Acropolis views

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Athens’ tourism boom capitalises on building regulations relaxed in the economic crisis

The 10-storey hotel at 5 Falirou street in Athens was always going to stand out. Built to impress, its handsomely modernist wood-panelled facade added a contemporary touch to the streetscape of the otherwise lacklustre popular Makriyanni area beneath the Acropolis.

But as local residents watched it go up over the winter, they became ever more concerned. By February, when it had reached 31.5 metres, the hotel was the tallest building in the neighbourhood and had started to impede what had once been uninterrupted views of the Parthenon and the 5000BC monument’s fortified walls.

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‘A race against time’: urban explorers record vanishing Hong Kong

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From Bruce Lee’s mansion to Bauhaus-style Central Market, HK Urbex are documenting the fast-changing city’s fading heritage

“We just had to hop the fence. It was kind of easy,” says Ghost, co-founder of HK Urbex, as he explains how the urban explorer group gained access to the former mansion of late martial arts superstar Bruce Lee.

Wearing masks to protect their identities, the group circled the abandoned home in Hong Kong’s upscale Kowloon Tong neighbourhood three times to make sure the coast was clear. As one member stood out front to keep watch, another leapt over the back fence. Twenty minutes later they were out again – another successful urban mission accomplished.

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UK museum agrees to return Ethiopian emperor’s hair

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National Army Museum says it has agreed to a formal request for two locks of hair of Tewodros II

A British museum has agreed to repatriate to Ethiopia two locks of hair taken from the head of the 19th-century emperor Tewodros II.

The National Army Museum on Monday said it had agreed to a formal request for the return of objects “considered to be of cultural sensitivity to Ethiopian citizens”.

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Easter Island looks for help to save statues from ‘leprosy’

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White spots eating away at the sculptures are softening them to a clay-like consistency and deforming their features

Within a century the emblematic stone figures that guard remote Easter Island could be little more than weathered rectangular blocks, conservation experts are warning – but Britain could be part of the fix.

The giant heads, carved centuries ago by the island’s inhabitants, represent the living ancestors of Easter Island’s Polynesian people – the Rapa Nui – and have brought it Unesco world heritage site status in its Pacific location more than 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile.

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The battle for the future of Stonehenge

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Britain’s favourite monument is stuck in the middle of a bad-tempered row over road traffic. By Charlotte Higgins

Stonehenge, with the possible exception of Big Ben, is Britain’s most recognisable monument. As a symbol of the nation’s antiquity, it is our Parthenon, our pyramids – although, admittedly, less impressive. Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum, recalls that when he took a group of Egyptian archaeologists to see it, they were baffled by our national devotion to the stones, which, compared to the refined surfaces of the pyramids, seemed to them like something hastily thrown up over a weekend.

Unlike those other monuments, though, Stonehenge is more or less a complete mystery. Nobody knows for sure why, or by whom, this vast arrangement of boulders was erected on Wiltshire’s downlands, in the south of England, about 5,000 years ago. Into this void have rushed myriad theories, from the academically sober to the blatantly fantastic. Over the centuries, its construction has been confidently credited to giants, wizards, Phoenicians, Mycenaeans, Romans, Saxons, Danes and aliens. (According to one medieval theory, Merlin had it transported from Ireland to serve as the funeral monument for Britons slaughtered by Hengist, the treacherous Saxon.)

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Demolition of Bristol eyesore makes way for university campus

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Temple Quarter’s rich past includes housing squatters, Royal Mail, a factory and cattle market

Demolition work is under way at Bristol’s most famous eyesore, bringing an end to a sprawling, derelict building that became a playground for squatters, illegal ravers and graffiti artists.

The former Royal Mail sorting office, which was once reportedly likened by the former prime minister David Cameron to the “entrance to a war zone”, is to be brought down to make way for a new university campus.

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‘Redefine the skyline’: how Ho Chi Minh City is erasing its heritage

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The next 15 megacities #7: More than a third of the Vietnamese city’s historic buildings have been destroyed over the past 20 years. Can it learn from mistakes made by other fast-growing Asian cities before it is too late?

“People don’t realise what they’ve lost,” says Candy Nguyen as she peers through the locked gates of what was until recently the historic Ba Son shipyard. “Many don’t even know what was here before.”

Ho Chi Minh City’s oldest and most important maritime heritage site is hidden from the street by high blue hoardings peppered with slogans such as “Never still” and “Redefine the skylines”.

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