Cane Hill Hospital – Transcience, Ruin and Restoration
March 2011
“Transcience: an impermanence that suggests the inevitability of ending or dying”
“Ruin: Verb. Reduce (a building or place) to a state of decay, collapse, or disintegration: “a ruined castle”.”
“Restoration: the act of restoring something or someone to a satisfactory state”
Severalls Hospital (2007-08)
Female ward blocks and Airing Court Shelter
I visited Severalls on five occasions between 2007 and 2009, some 10 years after its use as a hospital ceased, but prior to the commencement of demolition and some of the heavier vandalism that occurred in the later stages of dereliction. Although Severalls had been almost completely emptied of furnishings and other contents which give it a far greater sense of a well organised closure when compared to other derelict asylums I visited, it was an excellent example of a large post- GT Hine echelon design with villas, and the scale of the complex and its largely untouched estate ensured that an excursion to Severalls was always an immersive experience.
Park Prewett – lessons in dereliction
At the age of 20 and having spent the summer of 2006 staring endlessly at Urban Exploration websites I eventually took it upon myself to pull my finger out and actually participate in this hobby I had recently discovered. I signed up to a forum, and a week or so later found myself catching the train to Basingtoke one dusky February evening to meet a stranger off the internet. We took a bus up to the general hospital, and walked over to the clutch of derelict buildings on the edge of a cricket pitch.
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 B-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 »
London Gas
They’re all slightly different. Be it their location in an otherwise empty field, sat adjacent to a busy road junction, or tucked away betweeen houses, they’re all still slightly different. Some are getting torn down now. We turned up at Kings Cross to try to climb the 130 year old structures but they were gone, pillars of metal stacked up on the ground, ready for removal. Upon finding out they were going to be reinstalled once the crossrail works under the site are completed, I felt a wave of elation. Somebody else cares! Read the rest of this entry »
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 »