Netherlands

It’s Island Week 3 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week. Schiermonnikoog is a small island off the coast of the Netherlands, that only 758 years ago was actually 2 kilometres north…

The town of Brummen in The Netherlands is perhaps the last place you would expect to find a secret government conspiracy in action, but any other explanation would be naïve: Google have obviously been forced to disguise the structure with…

This is the Homomomomonument, er... we mean the Homomonument, in Amsterdam. Unveiled in 1987, the humorously-named monument serves as a very serious memorial to the many thousands of gay men and women who were murdered during the Second World War.…

A star fort or trace italienne is a type of military fortification first introduced in Italy around the mid-fifteenth century. Traditional medieval castles, towers and ring forts had proved extremely vulnerable to increasingly mobile cannons, and star forts were introduced…

Originally conceived by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785, the panopticon was intended to be a type of prison that allowed the guard to observe any of the inmates without them knowing if and when they were being watched. The…

On a rooftop in the Netherlands we find a blurry picture that may, possibly, if-you-squint-your-eyes, might appear to be two people that are lying very close to each other. Now, I'm not going to speculate what these people are doing…