It turned out that the yard was full of wrecked, rusted and derelict trains, most (if not all) having been made in America in Philadelphia’s Baldwin Locomotive Works or the Vulcan Iron Works in Wilkes-Barre, PA.  After I spent a little while wandering around the yard the owner (or at least keeper) of the place turned up, a lovely old man who rents out the space not filled by trains for use as a car park.  The man (whose name I couldn’t quite understand) spoke no English but proceeded to show me around the yard pointing our the ages on the trains, most of them seemed to have been made around 1920 but one was as old as 1873.

Here are a handful of shots that I took in the yard…

As before, I have selected a top ten list based on the number of Flickr photos I found for each site in a single search, doubtlessly I will have missed important sites and got the ranking wrong but please feel free to point them out by leaving a comment. All of the photos used below were taken by other photographers and are used under a Creative Commons license (click through to Flickr for attribution), if you think you’ve got a better photo and it’s not CC – get your licensing sorted!

Annesley, Clipstone, Pleasley

1. Hellingly

2. Cane Hill

3. West Park

4. Whittingham

5. Severalls

6. Denbigh

7. Deva

8. St Mary’s

9. Talgarth

10. St John’s

The articles include quick tips, safety and legal advice, lighting, working with a model, light painting, photoshop tips and even a competition to win an Epson Stylus Photo 1400 A3+ printer by submitting ‘dereliction themed’ photos which should be quite easy for most of us!

Pick up the magazine now at all good stockists (I’ve always wanted to say that).

I’ve put together a few examples of graffiti that I found whilst grazing the pastures of Flickr, I guess you can’t start any post like this without really mentioning l’artiste du jour: Banksy. Not only is this piece very pretty it also carries with it a heavy social commentary as does much of his work, whist it’s instantly funny I feel a wave of sadness when I look at it – that feeling of our history being washed away…

That’s not to say that you have to be particularly arty to create work with humour and social commentary, there’s something about this piece that I really like even though there’s not a great deal to it…

Whilst it doesn’t carry any appreciable meaning I love aethetics of something like this…

The same goes for this more elaborate and colourful piece, I love it…

I’m not really convinced that this next one counts as Street Art since it was an installation in the Tate Modern but I think it shows what impact a piece of art can have when rendered on a large scale (something graffiti plays to significantly)…

Please don’t get any of my praise confused with tagging (i.e. single line drawn names – neither colourful or artful), the pointless scrawling of a name across a building or railway bridge does nothing for anyone. I’ve heard arguments that graffiti started out as tagging so we should think it’s OK but I don’t buy it, tagging is for wankers – pure and simple. The above examples all take thought and skill, that’s what makes it art to me and that’s what makes it awesome.

I heart street art.

Incidentally I also found this interesting article 35 Beautiful Examples Of ‘Urban Decay Photography from Smashing Magazine – it’s not a ‘tips’ article but the shots themselves may provide inspiration if you’re looking for it.

Here’s some other recent photos not marked as Creative Commons…

The book is titled In a Landscape and aside from brief introduction it contains no significant text, there are over 100 individual shots broken into chapters by site. The book is printed and published by the print-to-order service Blurb and the price isn’t cheap (starting at £31.95) but the quality you get for the money is extremely good and there’s little to distinguish this from a commercially produced book as far as I can tell.

One of the main reasons I decided to purchase the book is that a lot of people I know just don’t ‘get’ what urban exploration is and what I mean when say that there’s beauty to be found in decay, I think being able to show them a copy of Paul’s book and they’ll instantly see what I mean. So if you fancy splashing out on a treat for yourself, or maybe for someone you know who’s into Urban Exploration then I recommend In a Landscape, I’ll leave you with a few of my favourite shots from the book…