Southern Street in Salford, Greater Manchester was a row of Victorian terraced houses typical of those built in this former industrial heartland of Britain. Over time its inhabitants were made to leave through a combination of alleged social ...


Hoyerswerda was once a boom-town - a model vision of GDR socialism, built around a large coal and gas plant. Between 1955 and 1981, the industrialisation of this medium-sized East German town took the population up to 71,000. A New Town had to be built ...


Manchester as the birthplace of the industrial revolution has always been a symbol for radical change. After decades of heavy decline and neglect, Manchester has of late been widely hailed as a model for urban regeneration. With gleaming architectural...


In its short history, Eritrea - the Land of the Red Sea - has seen its fair share of upheaval and violence. The country was born out of a protracted War of Independence from Ethiopia that rumbled on for three decades, variously involving the Soviet ...


A fitting monument to Germany's ill-fated colonial ambitions at the beginning of the 20th century, the former mining town of Kolmanskop, a few kilometres inland from the colonial-era trading post of Lüderitz, is being swallowed by the ...


Amongst Berliners, the burning issue at the moment is the creeping, and seemingly unstoppable, gentrification of their city. Rising rents, now incomparable to unusually cheap rates in the early 1990s, and a huge tourist boom in Berlin are driving up ...


On 22 September 2013, Germans cast their votes to determine their next government. The outcome of this election, however, has consequences for people far beyond the borders of Germany. Early polls suggest that the leading Christian Democratic Union ...


In the months before EU enlargement in 2004, right wing British newspapers were hysterically predicting that the country would be overrun with migrants from Eastern Europe - especially from Poland - willing to work for next to nothing. The UK, Sweden and...


China took a bow on the world stage in the summer of 2008, as the Olympic Games were held in Beijing. The country's performance was reliant on an army of stagehands who had toiled to prepare the scenery, lighting and props. Around 30,000 labourers are ...


Prince William County in Virginia is one of the highest-income counties in the United States, but it has seen thousands of home foreclosures since the credit crunch started to bite in 2007. In June 2008, Piotr Malecki and writer Tomasz Zalewski went in ...


On December 30th, 2008, a group of young men took an oath and became fully-fledged soldiers in the Polish army. Like generations before them, they would have felt a mix of pride and nervousness as they prepared to serve their country. But as they ...


The City boomed and now the City is bust. Until the final quarter of 2008, the British economy had seen over ten years of continuous expansion led by an unfettered financial services sector. Deregulation encouraged 479 foreign banks to set up offices in ...


I remember from my childhood the glory days of the Peace Race, a popular cycling event in which socialist Poland competed against our neighbouring friendly states. Each year the towns would empty as everybody found a television to watch our brave ...


Jacek Serkiew has been a postman for 40 years. As he makes his daily journey around the Polish town of Piaseczno, he is among friends. Meeting people is the best part of the job, he says. Every morning he carefully sorts through the letters in his ...


Ziemowit Howadek - Ziemek to his friends - lives a pretty ordinary life. He works as an IT specialist for a bank in Poznan, attends church and drives a Lada. But each year, in the week before Easter, Ziemek is nailed to a cross and crucified in front ...


Public House An establishment providing alcoholic beverages to be consumed on the premises. The traditional pub is an establishment found primarily in Britain and regions of British influence. English common law early imposed social responsibilities ...


Ireland is famous for its love of horses and the thoroughbreds raised on its verdant hills. During the boom years, when high-tech companies flocked to the "Celtic Tiger" and the construction industry overdosed on cheap loans, pet horses became a ...


A date has been set for the beatification of Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005 after an almost 27-year-long papacy. Vast crowds of pilgrims are expected in Rome on 1 May 2011 to witness the ceremony, performed by the current pope Benedict XVI, ...


In America, meat is big business. The meat and poultry industry is the largest sector of US agriculture, grossing an impressive US $ 155 billion in 2009 and employing a total of some 6.2 million people in companies involved in meat production along with ...


Call centre consultants are like doctors - they need to get under the client's skin to find out the most effective way of selling a product or getting valuable feedback. Call centre work is readily available and in most cases doesn't require any ...


Wika Szmyt is not your typical grandmother. 'Maturity has its charm' she says, smiling elegantly but a little reserved. 'Some people already know what they want when they are 20 while others grow up for longer. I think that I am in the second ...


About half a million people commute into Warsaw, the Polish capital, from surrounding towns and villages every day. For a city of 1.7 million, this constitutes a huge daily ebb and flow of workers, some of whom have to rise in the early hours to ...


During the Tour de France, the roads and byways of the country are lined with thousands of keen spectators. But it's not necessarily the riders they have come to see. The so-called Caravan Pubicitaire is the main draw for approximately 39% of all ...


Ekon Association in Warsaw is a recycling plant that provides jobs for people with learning difficulties or mental health issues who would otherwise find it difficult to get work.Some people working at Ekon have disabilities which they were born ...


It may not be everyone's taste in popular music but in Poland, Disco Polo is filling the clubs, blaring out of countless sound-systems up and down the country and drawing even some of the most ambivalent revellers onto the dance floor as the night ...


Every day, over half a million people commute into 'The City', London's traditional financial district, and Canary Wharf, its second business hub in East London. London generates almost a quarter of the UK's GDP, mainly through financial services. ...


Almost three years after his beatification, former pope John Paul II will be made a saint by Pope Francis on 27 April 2014 along with his predecessor, Pope John XXIII. John Paul II, revered by many Catholics, and nowhere more than in Poland, died in ...


Glasgow may well be the most passionate football city on earth. Its two mighty teams, Celtic and Rangers, are known collectively as the 'Old Firm', a sobriquet which hints at the stranglehold they have had on Scottish football for over 100 years. The ...


The 1992 famine in Somalia was, in common with many famines, as much the result of the civil war as the climatic conditions. In 1991 President Barre was overthrown by opposing clans, but they failed to agree on a replacement and plunged the country into ...


On 29th August 1949 the first Russian plutonium bomb was exploded at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, which came to be known as 'The Polygon'. This first detonation was followed by more than 500 nuclear explosions, both atmospheric and underground. ...


During the four year conflict in Bosnia more than 200,000 citizens were killed. Most of these were Muslim civilians murdered by paramilitaries during the ethnic cleansing of eastern and western Bosnia. Towns like Priedor, Banja Luka, Foca, Zepa and of ...


From the beginning of the Bosnian conflict in 1992, Paul Lowe takes us on a journey through Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Gorazde and Mostar - places that back then reverberated in the daily headlines much as Fallujah and Basra have done in more recent times. ...


It has a peculiar beauty, a concrete monolith winding across the landscape like a modernist snake in featureless grey concrete. Forty years after a war in which the Israeli military easily defeated the armies of three Arab nations and trebled its ...


For the players of FC Nepean Stars, a First Division Sierra Leonean football club, conditions could barely contrast more with the pampered lifestyle of their counterparts in Europe. Their squad of 18 players journey to matches in a single Toyota ...


'Are we protected in Pakistan?' asks graffiti on the wall of a burned-out shop in Shanti Nagar in the country's wheat belt. It provides its own stark answer: 'No'. Pakistan's three million Christians are nervous. They have been at the bottom of the ...


Graeme Williams began his photographic career as a photojournalist documenting the struggle to end apartheid. He never intended to become a photojournalist but as the clamour for Nelson Mandela's release grew in the late 1980s and the violence broke ...