Egypt's forgotten palaces - Telegraph During the summer of 2003, Xenia Nikolskaya visited Egypt as part of a team of Russian archaeologists excavating in Memphis, the ancient capital about 19 miles south of Cairo. As a photographer, her role was to document the artefacts dug from the ground, but her mind soon wandered elsewhere. Working with archaeologists you have a lot of interesting experiences but it gives you a very narrow perspective of a place. As soon as I could raise the money, I returned. In 2006, she rented an apartment in Cairo, spending her days wandering the serpentine streets of Garden City in the Downtown district. On one of her walks, she discovered a vast, crumbling mansion that would have been more at home on the streets of 19th-century Paris. Desperate to get inside, she contacted an architect historian and, armed with a map, began an archaeological forage of her own. Like many cities in Egypt, Cairo underwent a building boom under colonial rule. Between about 1860 and 1940, its Downtown area was reimagined in Beaux-Arts opulence. The district was divided into maidans and tree-lined squares, and lavish mansions sprung upward along its new boulevards, each vying with its neighbour for the most extraordinary expression of grandeur. "Governor Isma'il Pasha attracted foreigners with land grants, and money flew into Egypt," says Nikolskaya. If you had money, you could build almost anything. Her project, which Nikolskaya insists was "70 per cent research and 30 per cent photographing," took five years. She wanted only those buildings built after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, and before Nasser came to power in 1954, introducing the sequestration decrees that would send many of the wealthy elite into exile. Although the majority that matched her criteria were in Cairo, the project took her as far as Alexandria, Luxor and Port Said. The results - large, carefully composed and beautifully lit images of decrepit spaces - have been published in a book, titled Dust. Today these structures have mostly fallen into disrepair. In the Sixties, Nasser introduced a rent-control policy that would have disastrous repercussions. "Children could inherit houses and two generations later still be paying $20 a month," says Nikolskaya. It was so cheap that people on bad terms with the new regime would go away and leave the houses empty for 20, 30 years. Landlords weren't making any money, so they did not undertake any repairs. An estimated 42 per cent of the housing stock in Cairo is still frozen under this policy. Predictably, the future of these buildings is the subject of big discussion, "but the current political situation doesn't really allow people to think about it seriously; they have more important things to care about." One company is trying to bring new life to these places - the cinema in the book has just reopened as an arts centre - but it is slow work. If rich people want to buy a house, they don't buy in Downtown, they go outside of Cairo to gated communities where you have modern facilities and the air is better. During the demonstrations in January last year, Nikolskaya was dismayed to see the buildings next to the Geographical Society she had photographed on fire. I was very scared of what would happen to the building, and I was scared for myself, for everything that was going on. Does she see hope in Cairo for a new Egypt? I see only that the people are depressed, they think they are back to square one. Her photographs, she hopes, hold the possibility of a new future in their empty rooms: "What I was looking for was a sort of Hitchcock feeling that something was about to happen. These rooms are not sites of destruction, only of stagnation, a symbol of what the country has been going through in the last 40 or 50 years. The rooms, like the country, have a future; but it is an uncertain one.