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Looking back at Harmondsworth as he left, after 52 days inside, Amir was struck by how isolated the detention centre seemed Set back from the A4, it runs along the northern boundary wall of Heathrow, separated from the road by a car park and shielded from view by a line of houses and trees ‘The location is such that nobody can see you,’ he told me, a year after his release ‘This is how they make you feel cut off’   A year and a half ago I was scrolling aimlessly on the internet when I came across a simple website called ‘Detained Voices’, consisting of a series of short quotations from people who were being detained in ‘immigration removal centres’ in the UK Reading these disturbing fragments of testimony started me on a path that eventually put me opposite Amir in a Costa coffee shop in Stratford, as he told me about life in Harmondsworth   As I’ve learnt more about immigration detention I have become increasingly mystified by the place it occupies in our national discourse A set of nine prison-like buildings dotted around the country, these immigration removal centres are a recent phenomenon, yet already feel like part of the national furniture Harmondsworth, the first purpose-built immigration detention centre in the UK, was constructed in 1970 on the fringes of Heathrow, the country’s largest airport It had a capacity of 44 Over the eighties and nineties more and more facilities popped up around the country, until a burst of building under New Labour after the millennium brought the total number of places in these centres to just over 4,000 today   I became obsessed with the history of detention and with the building of Harmondsworth itself Rebuilt and expanded in 2001, it is now the largest detention centre in Europe I know which architectural practice designed the building (HLM Architects), who manufactured the heavy iron security doors (Lloyd Worrel Ironmongery), how much the retrofitted sprinkler system cost (£17 million) and who provided the toilets lacking in ligature points (The Plumb Centre) I learnt what ligature points are I learnt about the seven