Liminal spaces are places that feel transitional.
Locations that exist between one state and another.
They are neither fully here nor there.
They often feel empty, quiet, slightly unreal, dreamlike, or suspended in time. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin “limen”, meaning threshold.
These are the spaces we pass through on the way to somewhere else: corridors, waiting rooms, empty malls after closing, hotel hallways at night, abandoned attractions, underpasses, and certain institutional or religious buildings that no longer feel fully occupied.
What makes a space feel liminal is not just emptiness. It is a combination of familiarity and wrongness. The architecture is recognisable, the lighting is ordinary, yet something about the atmosphere feels detached from normal life. Time seems to move differently. Sound behaves strangely. The space feels like it is waiting for something or someone that never arrives.
On the contrary, liminal spaces can also be locations that feel oddly out of context with their surroundings: buildings and monuments that just shouldn’t be there. The formations that you stumble upon, that give you a sense of having walked into a simulation, or the unnerving feeling that you’re actually dreaming.
The modern interest in liminal spaces was heavily shaped by the viral “Backrooms” image, a photograph of an empty, yellow, low-lit room that felt both mundane and deeply unsettling. That single image helped people recognise a feeling they had already experienced in the real world, and gave it a name.
Real liminal spaces can be found everywhere: in cities, the countryside, within old buildings, and in places that were once busy but have grown quiet. Like dead malls and decaying hotels. Some are beautiful. Some are eerie. Many are simply still, and act as a portal of peace within the chaos of everyday life. This directory exists to collect and document those real places, the ones you can actually stand in. No Photoshop, no renders.
Just locations you can escape to.
You will also find a ‘Former Locations’ category that serves as an archive for all of the wonderful spaces that have been lost – usually to modernisation.