The Route

This is a journey through time and space, covering 1,000 years and 6,000 miles. We set off from the village of Nomansland in southern England, a site associated with medieval cracks between fiefdoms. We continue to yet another English no-man’s land: a site used to bury victims of the Black Death in London. Leaving the United Kingdom, we trace the militarized No Man’s Land of the Western Front, one of the iconic sites of the World War I that still bears the devastating scars war.

Our next stage takes us into the Balkans, along the route of the Iron Curtain in southeastern Europe, now the site of the European Green Belt. We point to the surprising transformation of strictly militarised spaces into ecological havens where flora and fauna are able to thrive. These southeastern edges of the European Union have witnessed the emergence of more recent no-man’s lands, some during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and other as a result of waves of migrants seeking entry into the EU from troubled countries in the Middle East and Africa.

Crossing into Cyprus, we travel into the UN Buffer Zone that divides the Island, but is also home to some creative initiatives for reconciliation and peacebuilding. The expedition culminates in the desert territory of Bir Tawil on the Egypt-Sudan border—the last truly unclaimed space on Earth.