A Life on Our Planet

Our Greatest Mistake

Pripyat in the Ukraine is a place unlike anywhere else I have been. It is a place of utter despair.

On the face of it, it seems quite a pleasant town, with avenues, hotels, a square, a hospital, parks with fairground rides, a central post office, a railway station. It has several schools and swimming pools, cafés and bars, a restaurant by the river, shops, supermarkets and hairdressers, a theatre and a cinema, a dance hall, gymnasiums and a football stadium with an athletics track. It has all the amenities we humans have brought into existence to give us a content and comfortable life – all the elements of our homemade habitat.

Surrounding the town’s cultural and commercial centre, are the apartments. There are 160 towers, built at specified angles to a well-considered grid of roads. Each apartment has its own balcony. Each tower its own laundry. The tallest towers reach almost 20 storeys high, and each is crowned with a giant iron hammer and sickle, the emblem of the town’s creators.