It is always hot, since the island lies near the equator, but the climate is mostly pleasant. “You make your own entertainment,” says Paul Abernethy, who runs the BBC relay station. “If you don’t do it, nobody else will.” There is a school, a hospital, clubs, even a golf course. All of this is supported by the wonderfully titled London Users Council, which includes the CSO, BBC and Cable and Wireless. With contributions in kind from the USAF, they have paid for all the niceties that keep the island from being just a barracks.It is a delicate equilibrium. “Altru-ism is the name of the game,” says John Cavana, head of Cable and Wireless on the island. “You have to balance your interests against those of other people on the island.

The Americans established it as a tracking station for their Eastern Test Range, a missile range that extends from Florida way down into the Atlantic. Some nights, from the Administrator’s formidable residence high on Green Mountain, you can see the rockets splinter and fall, a giant tropical fireworks show. Nasa, too, used it as a tracking station for while.The British also revived their interest, establishing a BBC relay station for the World Service and a station for monitoring broadcasts and radio signals under the aegis of the Composite Signals Organisation, the overseas arm of GCHQ.Then came the 1982 Falklands conflict, and suddenly Wideawake was the busiest airport in the world, ferrying supplies and troops down to the South Atlantic. After the war this was closed down, though the Americans maintained the lease, and Cable and Wireless resumed their hegemony.The Cold War brought new uses for a chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, Cable and Wireless took over the island, running it from 1922 to 1964.The Second World War saw the arrival of the Americans, who built Wideawake airfield as a way-station for aircraft on their way to West Africa and the Middle East.

Now it faces an uncertain future.The island was taken by the British in 1815, when Napoleon was exiled on “nearby” Saint Helena, as a defensive measure, then used as a stopping- off point for the West Africa squadron of the Royal Navy, a place to find water and food, or to leave the sick and wounded.It became a natural choice as a relay station for the submarine cables that curled their way up from South Africa. Its early history was predominantly naval, reflecting Britain’s insatiable appetite for strategic islands; it became a Cold War listening post, and then an airstrip for the Falklands War. The arrival of television and more regular flights has eased the isolation; but staring out from one of the hot, bare hills across the empty wastes of ocean to the distant horizon, it feels like being – nowhere.The history of Ascension Island has neatly followed the contours of the British Empire up and down over the last century and a half. “From a cosy place where everyone knew how things were, things are changing,” says Roger Huxley, the Administrator.
Ascension is a mere 34 square miles, a dot in the ocean that does not even feature on most maps – in between Africa and Latin America, yet of neither of them. And yet, as the last embers of the British Empire flicker, technology, politics and money are changing even Ascension Island, destabilising the fragile equilibrium constructed over a century.