The Age of Islands

In Search of New and Disappearing Islands

Alastair Bonnett

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786498120
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786498113
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

'Extraordinary... A fascinating and intelligent book.' Sunday Times New islands are being built at an unprecedented rate whether for tourism or territorial ambition, while many islands are disappearing or fragmenting because of rising sea levels. It is a strange planetary spectacle, creating an ever-changing map which even Google Earth struggles to keep pace with. In The Age of Islands, explorer and geographer Alastair Bonnett takes the reader on a compelling and thought-provoking tour of the world's newest, most fragile and beautiful islands and reveals what, he argues, is one of the great dramas of our time. From a 'crannog', an ancient artificial island in a Scottish loch, to the militarized artificial islands China is building in the South China Sea; from the disappearing islands that remain the home of native Central Americans to the ritzy new islands of Dubai; from Hong Kong and the Isles of Scilly to islands far away and near: all have urgent stories to tell.

PART ONE

RISING

Why We Build Islands

IN A DARK bar on the shores of Loch Awe a tall, beery fellow leaned into me and slowly explained that the crannogs – the ancient homesteads sprinkled in the lochs of Ireland and Scotland – were the very first artificial islands. I nodded meekly. It seemed likely and he was staring at me with red-eyed certainty. If I’m ever up that way again I may have the courage to lean back and put him right. The truth is that artificial islands are found across the world and that trying to claim any one as ‘the first’ is like trying to locate the first firepit or the first hut. Although often overlooked today, they are just too common to be easily or usefully tracked down to a single original source.

What are they for? Sifting through the layers of island-building history, the main reasons why people built them can be organized as follows: for defence and attack; to create new land for homes and crops; as places of exclusion; as sacred sites; and finally a rag-bag category of islands for lighthouses, sea defence and tourism. If we drill down into each of these purposes, we start to see continuities to our modern age of islands but also differences, not just in terms of number and size but in how they are used. For the majority of the world’s new islands have no pre-modern predecessors. These are the rigs and turbines, dedicated to oil, gas and wind power extraction, that dot so many horizons.

Defence and attack

Many of the reefs of the South China Sea have been bulked out and squared off to house missile silos, naval docks and runways. Although there is a long history of new islands born of strife, the oldest have nothing to do with sabre-rattling. In the Solomon Islands, the Lau fishing people built about eighty islands in a sheltered lagoon by paddling out – year after year, for centuries – and dropping lumps of coral into the water. The Lau built these islands to escape attack from mainland farmers. Many are still inhabited. Their defensive function has ceased to matter but they still offer protection from wild animals and malarial mosquitoes. Elements of this story can also be heard on Lake Titicaca in South America where another fishing community, the Uros, built a similar number of islands many miles from the shore in order to be safe from aggressive neighbours. Unlike the Lau’s solid structures, the islands of the Uros are made of reeds and float. This design reflects the building material to hand but also allowed the islands to be moved if under threat. Reed islands last about thirty years and need to be continuously remade. The Uros maintained these woven structures across hundreds of years. Today they are much closer to the shore and attract tourists from all over the world.

Ancient defensive artificial islands were small, occupied by families not soldiers, and never had much, if any, weaponry. In Europe the construction of more robust and professional artificial island fortresses began in earnest from the seventeenth century, and over the next three hundred years imposing stone forts were built on numerous reefs and sandbanks, usually to guard important ports. Some of the grandest were built by Louis XIV, such as the horseshoe-shaped Fort Louvois. Foundations for Fort Louvois were sunk into a muddy rise in the sea near Rochefort on 19 June 1691. At high tide it still looks startling: a castle rising from the water. In fact, Louvois saw only brief bouts of active military service. The last came on 10 September 1944, when it was shelled and briefly occupied by the fleeing German army.

Like a lot of militarized islets, the history of Fort Louvois is largely one of inactivity. Their main role has been as deterrents: they look big and bold in order to make invaders think twice. Peter the Great, having founded St Petersburg, sought to defend his creation with a series of spectacular sea forts. The first was Fort Kronshlot, built in shallow water during the winter of 1703. The most famous of the Petersburg forts is Fort Alexander, an immense oval begun in 1838. Fort Alexander was big enough to accommodate 1000 soldiers and 103 cannon ports. Like so many other dramatic offshore forts, Fort Alexander quickly became outmoded and, in military terms, useless. Having been demoted to a storage depot, it was given a new lease of life in 1897 when it became home to the research laboratory of the Russian Commission on the Prevention of Plague Disease. For twenty years this isolated, stone citadel caged a variety of animals used in plague experimentation, including sixteen horses whose blood was used to produce plague serum.

Their military life may be brief but the story of any well-built sea fort is rarely a short one. Cut off from the bouts of demolition that afflict the mainland, they often last a long time and see a range of uses. Many European nations are still trying to work out what to do with the military islands that freckle their coasts. Many stem from the busiest period of European island-building, which came in response to the threat of Napoleon and his heirs. Napoleon built his own islands, the most striking of which is Fort Boyard, an austere oval – resembling a giant napkin ring cast into the sea – that was built between 1809 and 1857. For many years it lay empty, but in the 1990s Fort Boyard began a new life as the setting for a French ‘escape the castle’ television game show that has had a number of international spin-offs.

Across the English Channel, Victorian sea forts are similarly intriguing but have been equally hard to find a modern use for. Occasionally they come up for sale, such as ‘Number 1, the Thames’, an address also known as Grain Tower Battery. This bizarre hodgepodge of Second World War gun emplacements stuck onto a mid-Victorian military island sits in one of the widest reaches of the Thames estuary. In 2014 it came up for sale for £500,000. This sounds like a meagre asking price given that islands are usually one of the most expensive types of property. However, while old sea forts may look good, they come with colossal maintenance bills. A similar problem kept down the price for the five forts built to defend Portsmouth in the 1860s. With 4.5-metre granite walls and armour plating, even when newly built they combined magnificence with obsolescence: at the very moment of their completion, the threat of the French invasion they were built to repel disappeared. In 2009 three of the forts were acquired for conversion, one into a museum (Horse Sand Fort) and two into luxury hotels (No Man’s Fort and Spitbank Fort). After huge investment, ten years later all three were being advertised for sale again.

Some fort-islands are so large and remote that their commercial opportunities are limited. Fort Jefferson is 19 hectares in size and 109 kilometres west of Key West in Florida. The largest brick building in the Americas, it was constructed in 1847. After being used to blockade the Confederate States during the Civil War, it had a limited life as a military prison and was abandoned in 1906. It is now an out-of-the-way tourist attraction set within the Dry Tortugas National Park, one of the most inaccessible of America’s National Parks. Many sea-forts do not even function as quirky tourist destinations and lie totally abandoned, breaking slowly apart under a weight of weeds. The hexagonal Fort Carroll is one such place. It lies in the Patapsco River in Maryland. Built to defend Baltimore in the 1840s it was bought by a family in 1958 and left to become what it is today, a stone wilderness and home to thousands of nesting sea birds.

Nineteenth-century fort-islands were built of stone or brick. During the First and Second World Wars military engineers began to use metal and the result was an array of raised – and, not long after, rusting – structures. The most famous is Sealand in the English Channel. On 2 September 1967, retired army major ‘Paddy’ Roy Bates climbed onto it and declared it was an independent country – a claim that is maintained by his descendants to this day. Sealand was one of a range of sea forts built off the English coast in 1942–43 that resemble oil and gas rigs. Some, like Sealand, have two rotund supporting legs while others rise on thin stilts and have a number of interconnected platforms. Assailed by stormy, salty seas, examples of the latter have not fared well. A few dilapidated examples linger on and had interesting afterlives, such as Shivering Sands Army Fort, which in 1964 was turned into a pirate radio station by the eccentric politician Screaming Lord Sutch.

After the Second World War, island-building shifted to the Pacific. The USA began reshaping atolls for military purposes. Johnston Island was bulked from 18 to 241 hectares in order to accommodate a landing strip. Today it is a long, unnatural-looking rectangle. At its peak about 1000 personnel were stationed there. The island was used for nuclear weapons testing in the 1960s and has a 10-hectare landfill full of toxic material, including drums of Agent Orange from the Vietnam War. To add to the poisonous brew, the island hosted an incineration plant for chemical weapons, including Sarin nerve gas.

New land for homes and farms

The most common form of ancient artificial island is a small homestead. The crannogs are one example. The homes of the Ma’dan, or Marsh Arabs, are another. Since the fourth century BC the Marsh Arabs have been building floating islands made of reeds in a junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Their way of life was almost destroyed when Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, drained the marshes. Since Hussein’s fall, there have been determined attempts to restore the marshes, and small groups of Marsh Arabs have chosen to return, fitfully reconstructing their former way of life.

Numerous homestead islands may accommodate a lot of people but each is a small and simple affair. A pre-modern counter-example is the island city of Tenochtitlan, the site of modern-day Mexico City. The invading Spaniards couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw it. They called Tenochtitlan ‘a very great city built in the water like Venice’. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, writing in 1576, told how the Spanish marvelled at Tenochtitlan’s size and beauty and at how it was a:

wonderful panorama, as picturesque as it was novel […] on account of the great towers and temples and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not all a dream.

Tenochtitlan was built by the Aztecs in the early fourteenth century and was home to around 500,000 people. It was semi-artificial, being extended from a natural island to spill out over several islets establishing a 13-square-kilometre platform connected by 20 kilometres of canals and raised roads. Historian Gerardo Gutiérrez tells us that ‘Moving through the city of Tenochtitlan would have involved a combination of canoes and walking through a complex network of streets and alleys connected by hundreds of bridges.’ Tenochtitlan linked together numerous artificial farming islands called chinampas. Chinampas are sometimes called ‘floating gardens’ though they don’t actually float; they are made by staking a reed fence to the lake bottom then piling on material until an island emerges. In Tenochtitlan, with the help of the chinampas, farming was urbanized, with hundreds of rectangular field-islands, all artificially created, linked in rows and bedded into the fabric of the city.

The ‘floating city’ is one of the many labels given to Venice, whose 118 islands are knitted round a network of canals and bridges. From the fifth century ad settlers fleeing raiders from the north began living on the region’s marshes. Later generations drove wooden stakes into the mud and created basic wooden platforms and buildings. From these simple beginnings the city of Venice emerged, perfecting the art of the semi-artificial island. To give an idea of the effort involved it is enough to note that, in 1631, to build Venice’s church of Santa Maria Della Salute, 1,106,657 4-metre wooden stakes had to be piled into the water.

The name of Venice is conjured again and again, like a charm or talisman, in modern residential island developments. The Venetian planning model of multiple canals and houses with direct access onto the water has been rolled out worldwide. Coastal reclamation for these schemes helps explain why – despite sea-level rise – since 1985 the world has gained more land from the sea than it has lost: an area, according to the Dutch research group Deltares, about the size of Jamaica. ‘The Venice of America’ is Fort Lauderdale, 40 kilometres north of Miami. Once a country town, from the 1910s Fort Lauderdale began to be transformed by entrepreneurs who realized that maximizing waterfrontage for newly built homes would create upmarket sales. Canals were built, land reclaimed and soon residential communities such as Las Olas Isles and Seven Isles were attracting buyers willing to pay over the odds for an exclusive address that offered privacy, security, views over water and quick access to their own boat. Although these new communities were usually advertised as islands, they were nearly always ‘finger islands’ – long, thin peninsulas joined by circuitous roads to the mainland. Finger-island development was to spread up and down the coast of Florida and, later, to the more prosperous parts of the coastal world.

Another influential set of Florida islands lies between Miami and Miami Beach in Biscayne Bay: the six ‘Venetian Islands’ built in the 1920s and 1930s and connected by a highway. Their names pay homage to their Italian forebears, such as San Marco Island, San Marino Island, and Di Lido Island. They showed that finger islands were not the only way to make money, and that real islands (albeit connected by a highway) could also offer canny developers premium returns.

The ‘islandization’ of coastlines is, for the most part, a form of suburbanization. The new island suburbs are scattered wherever water, land and money collide. As they grow they join up, creating an uninterrupted string of built-up water-facing townships that stretch along the seaboard. In some places, like Australia’s Gold Coast, this has resulted in the coastal landscape being transformed from a natural beachscape into a long chain of artificial residential island developments. There is a pecking order, of course: the standalone, ‘real’ islands usually have higher property values than the finger islands. The Gold Coast’s Sovereign Islands are its most expensive address. Reclaimed from sandbanks and mangroves, this gated community comprises six connected islands with a single bridge to the mainland. It was formed by dredging 2.3 million cubic metres of sand from adjacent waterways, a process that both built up the land and cleared a channel deep enough for the largest of luxury boats. Many of the houses on the Sovereign Islands are like palaces. They are well away from prying eyes but they are ostentatious. With names like Palazzo di Venezia or Château de Rêves (which became famous for having its swimming pools lined with 24-carat gold tiles), they are confident yet safely distant – loud statements of wealth that do not wish to be disturbed. Today the best-known examples of this kind of development are in the Gulf States. I’ll be exploring some of Dubai’s most outlandish examples later, when I take a trip to the most bizarre of them all, The World.

Some planning experts claim that we are transitioning to a feverish, hyperactive state in the creation of ersatz island locations. Two geographers from the University of Bristol, Mark Jackson and Veronica della Dora, argue that the ‘worldwide phenomenon of the artificial island has become a key defining imaginary and material form of 21st-century development visions’. Jackson and della Dora suggest that ‘urbanizing coastlines’ are seeking to ‘ornamentalize’ themselves. But living cut-off from the mainland is not just about decoration. It’s a form of self-exclusion. Islands are safe havens: away not just from noise, crime and crowds but from dirt and disease. Many small islands managed to stay Covid-free during the pandemic. The virus has become yet another reason why people might want to retreat into defensible territory, tucked away behind a barrier of salt water.

HOW THE MALDIVES IS BUILDING A FUTURE

All of the 1190 islands that make up the Maldives are projected to be underwater by the year 2100. The Maldives are fighting back with a flotilla of new islands, including an island city, floating islands for tourists and an island that landfills the endless garbage created by its tourist-based economy. The country’s tourist slogan ‘Maldives – Always Natural’ could scarcely be more misleading.

The centrepiece of the fightback is Hulhumalé, branded the ‘City of Youth’ and the ‘City of Hope’. It has been built 2 metres above sea level on a coral reef. Phase one is now almost complete and, in 2013, had a population of 30,000. The target is 60,000. It’s a 188-hectare urban rectangle with rows of anonymous apartment blocks. The 240 hectares of Phase two offers taller, more glitzy buildings and is designed to house a further 100,000. The idea is that Hulhumalé can become a safe home for about half the population of the Maldives. Where the rest will go is not so clear, though there is no shortage of plans, including mass relocation to India.

In the meantime the government is capitalizing on the Maldives’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Part One: Rising
• Part Two: Disappearing
• Part Three: Future
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index