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‘It’s the story of my life’: how a retired teacher transformed his memories into a miniature world

From postcards to 3D models of nativity scenes, Ken Bonham has spent decades crafting the vast collection of dioramas that fill his home in Birmingham

A miniature world can be found hidden inside a one-bedroom flat in Birmingham. For decades, Ken Bonham, a retired teacher, has made memory boxes of places he has visited with his dressmaker wife of 54 years, Maggie, each made up of items they have collected on their travels or Bonham has made.

Models of barns, castles and churches are also crammed into the property – made from cork, balsa wood, styrofoam – or 3D card elevations from Bonham’s photos. Each Christmas, Bonham delights his neighbours by crafting nativity scenes from items he has collected and crafted.

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© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

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Barracuda, grouper, tuna – and seaweed: Madagascar’s fishers forced to find new ways to survive

Seaweed has become a key cash crop as climate change and industrial trawling test the resilient culture of the semi-nomadic Vezo people

Along Madagascar’s south-west coast, the Vezo people, who have fished the Mozambique Channel for countless generations, are defined by a way of life sustained by the sea. Yet climate change and industrial exploitation are pushing this ocean-based culture to its limits.

Coastal villages around Toliara, a city in southern Madagascar, host tens of thousands of the semi-nomadic Vezo people, who make a living from small-scale fishing on the ocean. For centuries, they have launched pirogues, small boats carved from single tree trunks, every day into the turquoise shallows to catch tuna, barracuda and grouper.

A boat near lines of seaweed, which has become a main source of income for Ambatomilo village as warmer seas, bleached reefs and erratic weather accelerate the decline of local fish populations

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© Photograph: Claudio Sieber

© Photograph: Claudio Sieber

© Photograph: Claudio Sieber

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The best design and architecture of 2025

This year’s highlights include the remodelling of a Richard Seifert brutalist ‘corncob’ tower, a celebration of Japanese carpentry and a wearable hot-water bottle
The best art and photography of 2025
More on the best culture of 2025

In a case of contents outshining the container, the V&A’s national museum of everything takes the public up close and personal to a gallimaufry of precious things, from porcelain to poison darts, textiles to tiaras. Elegantly shoehorned into the gargantuan hangar that was originally the broadcasting centre for the 2012 Olympics, it’s an Amazon warehouse crammed with global treasures, setting visitors off on an odyssey of “curated transgression” through an immersive cabinet of curiosities.

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© Photograph: Iwan Baan

© Photograph: Iwan Baan

© Photograph: Iwan Baan

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