BBC News has a story on Alisdair Pinkerton and Noam Leshom’s research project into historical and current examples of No Man’s Land.

What exactly is No Man’s Land? It may be the space on a battlefield between two opposing front lines, a buffer zone between two countries or a parcel of land unclaimed and ungoverned by local authorities. The notion has never been fully defined so two men are travelling across Europe to a puzzling area on the Egypt-Sudan border in order to understand it better.

The term “No Man’s Land” may conjure up images of shell-holed battlefields, mud, barbed wire and shredded tree trunks, but it goes back much further than the trenches of World War One.

“I think people fail to realise that the term ‘No Man’s Land’ has a 1,000-year history,” says Alasdair Pinkerton, an expert in human geography at the Royal Holloway University of London. [more here]