St Cadoc’s Mental Hospital
On a weekend visit with Tom and Lula we passed by Newport and decided to call in at St Cadocs, while heading to Talgarth. Now St Cadoc’s isn’t your usual trip through a fence and in a broken window. Why? Because it hadn’t closed yet.
Mullard’s One Miler.
I don’t really know about telescopes. How they work isn’t of any great interest to me, but I respect the complexity of them and the knowledge that’s gone into building them. The Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory houses a number of telescopes, operational and decommissioned. An antenna of the 1964 One Mile Telescope just happened to be the one that we could park closest to, so as the July sunset faded orange light across the sky, myself, Marc and Keitei waded across the high wet grass in the adjacent field, and ascended.
Heavy Mettle
Sometimes when you’re in a drain, there’s a point that you stop moving because you hear a heavy rumble. It gets louder and louder and then passes, and you carry on the trudge through the pipe towards whatever lies ahead, with the only sounds present being the echoes of far off, and the splish splash as you kick through the foot or so of standing water that is often sat at the bottom. There’s few reminders of the human world when you’re in the spaces made entirely for human effluent and storm water, but there’s never full detachment from the ‘real’ world.
Foxtrot Б-39
The ‘Black Widow’ is a former Russian Foxtrot Б-39 (U 475) Hunter Killer Class Submarine, sat perched in the Medway at Rochester. To get to it you need to apply a bit of creative thinking, but The Winch isn’t exactly the place for the cheatcodes so you’ll have to use the visual clues below. Read the rest of this entry »
Stories from The Shard of Glass.
Stories from The Shard came to the forefront of the national and international press at the start of April. Brad and Otter simultaneously posted reports on their blogs and within 48 hours, every major newspaper and broadcaster with any interest in London or the forthcoming Olympics was seeking information and interviews from anybody who explored in London, to run front page stories. Read the rest of this entry »
The Hungarian Road.
Of course, not every moment of a roadtrip is spent shuffling round sewers, hiding from security guards in the Metro and climbing bridges. There’s the mandatory derping, train play, police intervention, angry foreigner interaction, budget food seeking, ‘prohobo’, sleep deprivation, automobile incidents and general swagger of the Brit abroad. Marc brought his gallic flair to the party, teaching us to speak ‘forrin’ whilst myself and NC Kapita incorrectly assumed that everybody east of Vienna would look and speak like Borat. Read the rest of this entry »
Protected: London Gas
Antwerp Pre-metro
The usual assumption about the Antwerp Pre-metro within the exploring community is that the ‘pre’ represents the fact it hasn’t opened yet. Not correct. The Pre-metro is actually a properly dug and operating metro system, which is just not running metro stock yet. During the IDM weekend, we followed Patch, Site and Jess down into the live network for a look around. Read the rest of this entry »
Bromley-by-Bow
The loops created by the river and road network winding through the industrial areas in East London separate small swatches of land almost equally shared by run down warehouses and disused land, light industrial space and new construction, eagarly cracking on for the forthcoming Olympics. Sat on a patch between some new-build apartments and the A11 is the St Andrews development. Read the rest of this entry »
Newport Transporter
2012, the year of something else? I’d decided I wanted to do some different stuff in different places, and the Newport Transporter Bridge fitted the bill. Brad, Marc, Neb and Urban Fox joined me on the trip down the M4 for this adventure, at a place from which surprisingly few photos have appeared on the internet. Lets rectify that. Read the rest of this entry »