The Winchester

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.

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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 »

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 »

When it snows, go in Drains. A few Gentlemen and I decided to participate in COTS in December 2010, having seen a few delightful pics of the system online. This section of Collossus of the South was everything I was expecting it to be, more impressive even than Hastings’ Stinger storm drain, with a deliciously different feature; the plughole that leads down from the Victorian sections.
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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 »

October 2011

Dark, smelly and not high enough to walk in without stooping, the access to Last Bastion is a five foot diameter sewer pipe which eventually diverts to the Northern Low Level sewer. Upon passing the diversion, there is perhaps fifty metres of ankle deep half sludge, half shit, which is amongst the most unpleasant sections of sewer I’ve had the pleasure of navigating. Read the rest of this entry »

Much to Otter‘s chagrin, ‘Verticality‘ has entered the vernacular of the current London ‘UE’ Set. Discussed at length on Placehacking, where Brad first coined the concept, it sits alongside ‘Edgework‘ and the much derided ‘Prohobo‘ as a term that wouldn’t neccesarily mean a lot to anybody else, but is in somewhat regular usage among this group of individuals. Read the rest of this entry »

“Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.” (Vladimir Putin, 2000.)

Gotha

Take your eyes off the pothole ridden minor roads of the former DDR and chances are you’ll be looking at something concrete that was built by the Soviets. My introduction to the remains of the Soviet Union came in 2008, with the Beelitz-Heilstätten sanatorium providing an ample opportunity for a day of roaming around the vast, derelict campus, taking photos of the peeling paint and lnely chairs. Although at the time I visited, I understood little of the involvement of the Soviet Union in this complex’s history, my interest has evolved and I’ve learned of the Sanatorium’s footnote as the ultimate destination for the DDR’s president Erich Honecker as his country collapsed into westernisation. Read the rest of this entry »

February – May 2011

When Brad left London in February 2011 he left behind a set of keys and a note. The keys were for his flat in Clapham and the note said to enjoy ourselves. We ended up with almost 4 months of this London base, and enjoy it we did. Read the rest of this entry »

February 2011

It seems like ages now since we went to Rubix. Just a long brick pipe with a little junction at one end. It’s fed by the River Effra, long since buried under the streets of South London and turned into a sewer. Rubix itself is known as the South Western Storm Sewer, essentially there to collect the overflow from the sewer when it rains. Read the rest of this entry »