Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura
There are many routes to Misery. From the north, you can take the Rue du Jeu de Paume; from the east, the Rue de Licourt; and from the south, the Rue de Billy, a meandering asphalt track that winds past bare fields, under an open sky. Any of these will lead to this French village of around 140 residents, 90 miles north of Paris.
Misery is one of more than 150 places with a desperately sad name, chronicled by the Australian artist Damien Rudd on his Instagram account, Sad Topographies. In British Columbia, Canada, the remote Sorrow Islands look out over miles and miles of empty ocean; Terrible Mountain can be found in Vermont; in Las Vegas, a wrong turn off Hearts Desire Avenue will leave you on Broken Heart Street, a lonely stretch of road 177 feet long. Each one has been lovingly screenshot from Google Maps and put on display—the world’s most joyless places, laid out in a feast of wretchedness, despair, and general disappointment.
It all started, Rudd says, when he learned about the Australian expedition of the explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, in which the men attempted to lead a party of 19 approximately 2,000 miles across Australia in 1861. Along the way, they sought to reach a place called Mount Hopeless, a 420-foot elevation in South Australia, but ran out of food and water and died in the Outback. The peak had been named some 20 years earlier by the English explorer Edward Eyre, Rudd says. On a similar cross-Australian journey in 1840, “he got to this hill, and he looked out, and there were these salt water plains.
Basically, the expedition had to end, and it had only just begun,” Rudd says. In his expedition journal, Eyre wrote of that day: “Cheerless and hopeless indeed was the prospect before us … This closed all my dreams as to the expedition.”This was Rudd’s first sad toponym. Inspired, he began searching for other examples of locations with desperate…
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