Empty houses line a street in the Lancashire town of Accrington. There are an estimated 850,000 empty homes in the United Kingdom even though local councils still have long waiting lists for housing. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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The terraced houses were due to be rejuvenated by Accrington council but the project was put on hold when the government cut a housing regeneration project.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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In terms of sheer number, Accrington and the wider Lancashire area have the highest amount of empty homes in England.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Snow settles on the derelict West Pier in Hove.Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
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The pier served as a major attraction for over a century before closing in 1975.Julian Herbert/Getty Images
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While operational, the 1,000-plus-foot pier featured a grand concert hall and a fairground, among other attractions.Alan Bloom/Flickr
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During the pier's best years (the first two decades of the 20th century), those attractions drew in as many as two million visitors per year.Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
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However, since unmanageable costs caused the pier to be abandoned in 1975, it has fallen into further disrepair thanks to storms, high winds, and two fires.Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
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Derelict vacation homes await demolition at Pontins Holiday Camp in Blackpool.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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The camp was closed in 2009 due to falling visitor numbers.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Above, the decaying interior of one of the camp's derelict holiday chalets awaits demolition.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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More crumbling chalets at Pontins.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Abandoned homes like these in Liverpool sat at the center of a political battle in 2015, between those who wanted the area to be redeveloped and those who wanted it preserved as a historic district.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Derelict homes stand on Arnside Road, in the Kensington area of Liverpool. In 2013, the city council began selling off a selection of its abandoned housing stock for just £1 each in the failed redevelopment area known as the Granby Triangle.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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More abandoned homes in the Granby Triangle.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Likewise, the city council of Stoke-On-Trent sold off dozens of derelict homes for £1 each in 2013.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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A woman performs maintenance work on her home next to derelict houses in the Cobridge area of Stoke-On-Trent. The homes are being sold by the council for £1.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Old abandoned houses are now used for military training in the village of Imber, which was evacuated in 1943 by the military for training US soldiers preparing for the D-Day invasion. Matt Cardy/Getty Images
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Imber's villagers were told at the time of evacuation that they would be allowed to return in six months. However, despite public appeals, the villagers' hopes were never realized and to this day the village remains in the control of the Ministry of Defense.Matt Cardy/Getty Images
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An abandoned factory waits to be demolished in Stoke-On-Trent in 2012.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Stoke-On-Trent and the surrounding area have borne the brunt of the country's economic downturn with the loss of close to one-third of its manufacturing jobs over the late 2000s, the highest rate of any area in the United Kingdom.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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More abandoned properties in Horden.Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
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Vacant homes waiting for redevelopment spruced up with murals in Liverpool.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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More vacant homes adorned with murals.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Properties that have fallen into neglect due to funding cuts to a local housing association in a former mining village in Horden.Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
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A man walks past the former Swan Lane Mill, now partly derelict, in Bolton.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Members of Wood Cricket Club play next to derelict terraced houses in Duke Bar, Burnley, Lancashire. This area is the cheapest place in all of England and Wales to buy a home.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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The abandoned Chatterley Whitfield Colliery, the most comprehensive surviving deep mine site in England.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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The historic colliery was the first to extract one million tons of coal in a year and is one of the many industrial heritage sites on the English Heritage at Risk Register. The register is the largest ever research project into the condition of England's industrial heritage.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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An abandoned farm house sits in Burscough.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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The sun begins to set over some of the abandoned historic vessels in the boat graveyard between Sharpness and Purton on the banks of the River Severn in Gloucestershire. More than 80 vessels were beached there from the 1900s to the 1960s to stop the banks being eroded by the tides, but the wrecks are slowly being vandalized or stripped by scavengers seeking firewood or unusual house ornaments.Matt Cardy/Getty Images
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An abandoned farm house sits in Hawes, a small town located within Yorkshire Dales National Park.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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A former mill lays derelict waiting for redevelopment in Rochdale.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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An abandoned shack sits alone in a field in Wiltshire.Chris Neal/Flickr
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A derelict china factory sits in Stoke-On-Trent.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Disused fishing railway, hut, and boat near the shore in Dungeness.Roger Marks/Flickr
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Disused World War II radar dishes sit at a Royal Air Force station in Stenigot.Darren Flinders/Flickr
For those of us outside the United Kingdom, the tide of "Brexit" headlines that dominated the news cycle this spring were often perplexing, likely for one of two reasons.
You either weren't exactly sure what "Brexit" meant, what exactly the European Union was, and why anyone might want to leave it. Or you had a decent handle on all of those concepts but couldn't conceive of the U.K. voters who would actually vote to leave the E.U.
Before the vote, the cosmopolitan, left-leaning, largely London-based British press consistently warned that leaving the E.U. would prove disastrous for the U.K.
After the vote, with the majority in favor of leaving the E.U., both the British press and much of the international media then questioned how the hell this happened -- over and over and over again.
And a big part of the reason why it happened -- and why so many were so shocked when it did -- is that the U.K. voters who did vote in favor of leaving are precisely not the people whose voices are often heard on the national, let alone the international, stage.
Those voters largely hailed from the relatively ignored swathe of central England known as the Midlands. More to the point, those voters were largely working class.
And the industrial and manufacturing base that once sustained the working class across the Midlands and many other areas of England outside of London is now, for the most part, gone.
Countless factories and housing projects once home to those who labored in them now sit abandoned and decrepit. This is the England that has long been neglected.
And, as the Guardian wrote just days after the Brexit vote came in, "The neglected suddenly discovered they could use their EU referendum vote to get back at those who had never listened to their grievances."
The photos above illuminate the striking neglect of certain sections of the U.K. -- and perhaps why the E.U. didn't seem like a partnership worth keeping.
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.
Savannah Cox holds a Master's in International Affairs from The New School as well as a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and now serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Sheffield. Her work as a writer has also appeared on DNAinfo.
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Kuroski, John. "37 Eerie Scenes Of Abandoned Places Across The UK." AllThatsInteresting.com, August 16, 2016, https://allthatsinteresting.com/abandoned-places-uk. Accessed March 25, 2025.
