Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions

Great Britain has just left one Union, after years of bitter argument and divisive

posturing. But what if the island's future lies in another Union altogether, with some of

its former colonial “kith and kin” across the seas? Why be in a Union with your

immediate neighbours, when you could instead be in a trans-oceanic super-state with

our old friends in Canada, Australia and New Zealand? Welcome to the strange world of

the 'CANZUK Union', the name for a quixotic but apparently serious plan to reunify the

white-majority 'Dominions' of the British Empire under the flag of low taxes, strong

borders and climate change denialism.

Artificial Islands tests the idea that Britain's natural allies and closest relations are in

these three countries in North America and the Antipodes, through a good look at the

histories, townscapes and spaces of several cities across the settler zones of the British

Empire. These are some of the most purely artificial and modern landscapes in the

world, British-designed cities that were built with extreme rapidity in forcibly seized

territories on the other side of the world from Britain. Were these places really no more

than just a reproduction of British Values planted in unlikely corners of the globe? How

are people in Auckland, Melbourne, Montreal, Ottawa and Wellington re-imagining their

own history, or their countries' role in the British Empire and their complicity in its

crimes? And do they have any interest in a union with us?