For Bluecoat, specialists in documentary photography, James Lacey’s A World In Ruins represents something of a departure. And yet the images within do perform a documentary function, recording the physical deterioration of buildings that are beginning “to crack under the weight of time”. The book features a host of incredible edifices left to rot: French chateaux, Italian villas, Hulme Hippodrome, Liverpool Fruit Exchange, Antwerp Chamber of Commerce. Lacey finds decaying churches particularly poignant, as places that once symbolised belief and hope. His photos serve as a form of preservation in the face of demolition.

What absolves Lacey from accusations of indulging in “ruin porn” is his interest in the human stories that these buildings could tell. “I began to sympathetically photograph the fascinating visuals in front of me,” he writes, “but it was equally important to capture a sense of what was absent. The critical missing element: the people”. Abandoned homes, in particular, pique his curiosity – and that of the reader: “Who lived there? Who worked there? Why did they leave? Where did they go? Where are they now?”

Lacey’s accompanying text is at times clunky, over-egged and superfluous, but A World In Ruins is nevertheless an engaging portrait of disintegrating buildings and the ghostly figures who once inhabited them.