Archive for the ‘Dereliction’ Category
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.
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.
Londonsplore
December 2011
Buk put together a long awaited explorer gathering and dubbed it Londonsplore. With the derelict location and expectation of an all-nighter , the event echoed other enticing social urban experiences from the previous 12 months or so. Somewhere along the line somebody had said that having more parties would be a good thing and everybody seemed to gain an experience from this one. I don’t know what kept us waiting so long really – complacency maybe? Read the rest of this entry »
Flakturm
November 2011
Three days ripping up Budapest while barely sleeping took it’s toll, yet somehow we made it to Vienna alive. NC Kapita and Marc slept in the car as I drove and despite a 2 hour blitz for info while connected to the McDonalds free wifi at Gasometer City, we were left with plenty of time to take a look at the delights of Vienna. Read the rest of this entry »
Charleroi Pre-metro
July 2010
Charleroi has 6km of disused by completed metro line, incorporating 4 stations and connecting to the existing metro. Don’t get too excited however, this isn’t a veiny network of tunnels under the city like Antwerp’s premetro, nor is it a line genuinely under construction. It’s simply a railway that was built in the 1980s, connected to the metro lines and unfeasibly, never opened. Read the rest of this entry »
Dereliction Fetish
July 11
It was a nice experience, to delve into dereliction again. After months of construction, sewers, tunnels, trains and cranes, the prospect of a day of derelict places was starting to appeal and as such, the derpmaster general of the group put together a list of musty places to go in The Midlands.
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”
Courage Brewery
April 2010
Fresh off the presses at the Reading Evening Post, the Town’s final B was to close. Biscuit production in the town had ceased in 1974 with the closure of Huntley and Palmers, bulbs in 1976 when Suttons’ Seeds relocated to Devon, and finally on April 2nd 2010 the Courage brewery was closed, with the production absorbed by the rest of the network. The only remnant of Reading’s industrial past was to be the buildings left behind, or a natty bar underneath the town hall bearing the name, “The Three B’s”
Caserne Montlaur – Corsica – October 2010
Quite a grey set of buildings really, Caserne Montlaur. Perched on top of a rocky outcrop in a small city of 3,000 on a French island about the size of South Wales. Population of the island? About the same as Reading. No wonder the population is depleted. Theres no work on the island unless you fancy running a restaurant or hotel, and as such, more than three times of the population of Corsica has left it to seek work on mainland France. You like abandonment? We’ve got a whole island for you here.
Polska Sowiecka – August 2010
‘Poster’
As we sat on the ferry back from our December adventures in 2009, we jokingly said we’d go to Poland and explore the Soviet military bases there. Hit another country, new places, new people, new adventures right? I decided the best way to do this was to integrate it into our summer roadtrip, and lo and behold, after a week in Belgium and Germany, we found ourselves passing the Border into Poland, past the freshly rusting border crossing from the days before the EU.