Nuuk is the largest city on the largest island in the world, and barely seven thousand people call it home. Thousands more have moved there in recent years for reasons far beyond its own control. This once sleepy fishing town has become an indirect victim of the Cold War - not from the ravages of dictatorship or the shriek of missiles and bombs, but from the cold embrace of neglectful indifference.

The area around Nuuk has been settled since the Mesolithic, but its modern incarnation came into being as the fort of Godthåb in 1728. Even then, it was a forgotten outpost at the edge of the world, left to its own devices by its supposed overlords, its Danish locals suppressing the Inuit culture and leaving them in abject poverty. So it went for centuries until global gales turned the isolated glacier into a North Atlantic bastion between Europe and America. Without warning, Uncle Sam swept in to occupy Greenland, bringing thousands of soldiers which fanned into bases and outposts to propagate the next era of occupation - and, with their own concerns at the forefront of their minds, Nuuk remained as ignored as it had ever been.

Nuuk today is underfunded, overlooked, and beaten down. While the bases which dot the hills around it play host to looked-after American soldiers, its own concerns are resolutely set aside by its new, infinitely more powerful overlord, who considers the city as nothing more than a minor pawn in a greater geopolitical game. For now, the people of Nuuk and Greenland as a whole accept the miserable status quo, but this surely cannot hold forever.