Sick Britain

I’ve been hankering after a proper wide-angle lens for a while and after ages of trying to decide between the Sigma 10mm and the Sigma 10-20mm, I’d kind-of settled on the zoom because you get a little more flexibility and it’s cheaper but I’d read that the 10-20 had quite poor build quality.  On a pay-day whim I ended up buying the Tamron 10-24mm (which had favourable comparisons to the Sigma 10-20) and tonight I popped out to give it a quick test – the weather was turning out rubbish so I needed somewhere indoors and Harperbury seemed ideal.

The place was in an even worse state than the last time which one would expect to be the case in a derelict building but the bulk of the new damage is human and one of the previously sealed buildings was open on three sides, I even saw the remnants of what would’ve been a padded cell but only the floor was intact as the walls had been stripped bare.

It was interesting to explore a couple of new rooms but they all looked essentially the same as the others anyway – pretty mashed up…

It’s often difficult to find inspiration in a site you’ve visited before and I really struggled to find anything to do that I’d not done before, despite the new lens – it didn’t help much that I was knackered after a long day at work either.  

I guess this is a lesson really, that the fun and interesting part of Urban Exploration really is the ‘exploration’ component – finding something new and interesting as opposed to covering the same ground over and over again. Just because it’s probably the most diverse building on the site, I spent the longest amount of time in the swimming pool block doing a couple of long exposures but I really didn’t get anything I hadn’t done before and I didn’t have the patience to do time consuming work such as light painting, which is a pity as it’s quite a cool spot to do it.

I achieved the lighting in these shots through a combination of the light from my head torch and the external flash unit being handheld off-camera…

Popularity: 68% [?]

All over the UK dotted throughout countryside and city alike lie abandoned asylums, relics of a bygone era of mental health where the aim was to isolate patients in a secure facility rather than integrating them with the community. Here I have selected a top ten list based on the number of Flickr photos I found for each asylum 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!

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

Popularity: 100% [?]

I spent many happy days of my childhood at the American Adventure theme park and when I read recently (on an urbex forum) that it had shut down I decided that I must visit.  The park opened in 1987 and was open for almost 20 years, closing in January 2007.  My personal favourites were the Rocky Mountain Rapids and The Missile which, in its day, had been the voted the #1 rollercoaster in the UK.  You can read about the sad decline in the Wikipedia article as well as getting some nostalgic kicks from the American Adventure fan site and browsing the original American Adventure website on the Internet Archive.

This was one of my quick visits in between places so I stowed the car in the first possible place I could find by Googling “american adventure theme park postcode” and slinging the result (DE7 5SX) into my sat-nav, and went for a walk into the site. Despite the fact that it was a miserable day there were plenty of people walking dogs and riding bikes around the perimeter of the place which is a little disconcerting when you’re trying to work out how to subvert a fence! In the end I spotted a clear and easy hole in a metal gate and slipped through unnoticed, there were several spots though so access isn’t an issue.

I didn’t make it around the entire site but what I could see was fairly barren, there are some admin buildings left and there was clear evidence of fire in certain places…

… and some other commercial detritus…

Occasionally you’d spot some clear and definitive evidence that the site had been a theme park, such as bits of rides…

Points where rides had been anchored…

You could also see where the old railway line had been, carting people around on a little model steam train…

I know that there’s a lot more see but the rain and time constraints really stopped me from going much further, it didn’t help that I’d neglected to put on my wellies (see this post) so my feet were beginning to get a bit squelchy and I couldn’t venture into the muddier bits, next time I’m buzzing up the M1 I’ll try and make sure I’ve got some more spare time on my hands and go back for a more thorough explore.

Popularity: 31% [?]

The fact that there’s so many abandoned asylums across the country mystifies me, why did they all close? Where are all the former and/or expected residents? Are we all collectively more well-adjusted these days to the point where asylums are no longer needed? I think this mystery along with the general mystery of the mind and its maladies is what makes exploring abandoned asylums a particular favourite of mine, they have odd layouts and structures – nothing quite like an industrial or commercial site.  West Park has been on my ‘to do’ list for a while, it’s one of the more popular destinations on the urbex ‘circuit’ and I assumed that because of this and the wealth of Flickr photos of the place that it was completely uninhabited and extremely easy to get into but only one of my assumptions was true. On arrival I followed my sat-nav right up into the complex, right past the security/construction hut and up to a place with at least 20-odd cars dotted about – not the abandoned site I was expecting! Whilst I was driving up the main internal road I did spot what appeared to be a derelict area in the background so I knew I was in the right place but I just hadn’t approached it in the best way, as it goes I’d have probably gotten away with parking amongst (what I assume are) the staff cars because there were enough of them that I probably wouldn’t have looked out of place.  Instead I just stuck the car around the corner in a less obtrusive place though I did park it on its own so perhaps it would’ve stood out more. Rather than walking right back through the main gate I wandered up a footpath alongside the complex and came across one of several holes in the fence that was a doddle to step through, still I ended up behind a building that looked like it might be in use so I was getting a little concerned but a short walk around the back of this building (and the accompanying van parked outside) led to an area that was clearly abandoned and a massive area it is! I wasn’t really limited by time during my explore at West Park but I knew that I’d only be there a few hours, I find that explores lasting much longer are more likely to result in detection so I don’t like to push my luck, with that in mind I treated the day as extended reconnaissance and tried to get a good feel for the place with a view to returning in the future. Once into the derelict area of the site I came across building after building, most of them sealed which I presume were wards though I couldn’t get into them to see what the layout was like, each of the buildings had an accompanying green hut that was half way between a summer house and a bus shelter. After coming across so many sealed buildings I eventually got to an area where there were lots of smashed windows, this allowed me to grab a couple of shots by putting the camera through the window and shooting with the flash on, the photos didn’t always turn out but it’s interesting to see what was in there. After the smashed-window building I found a door that had been sealed but subequently ripped open, I clambered in and found what is probably the grubbiest and most rotten room I’ve ever seen during an explore…

Whilst I was positioning my camera to take shots of this room I did have a feeling that there was someone nearby, I even saw a shadow (of what looked like a man) flick across one of the windows at the far end of the building which got my heart pumping a little bit! After staying still for a while I carried on taking photos but for at least fifteen minutes I had a definite sense that I wasn’t alone and sure enough when I clambered back out of the doorway I was confronted by a deer, yes – a deer! There seemed to be quite a lot of them in this area of the complex and whilst they were a bit jumpy they were very curious and in some cases approached me for a better look, only the babies ran away through fear – the adults just stood there stating at me. After the ‘Caution Wet Floor’ room I came across a boarded up prefab right next to what looked like an entrance to the site next to a large car parking area, I think this may be one of the boundaries between the derelict site and the live site, there was a van parked in the near distance as well but I couldn’t see any signs of activity so I carried on. The prefab’s lock was smashed off so I had a look around, the place was completely boarded up so it was pitch black inside but with my trusty head torch I could see that the place was in a derelict but not completely ruined state, I managed to get the chair shot below on a 30s exposure, at f/14 on ISO 1000 and that was with the aid of the head torch! Other than having a couple more face-offs with the local wildlife I didn’t stick around too much longer, I identified a few areas that warrant further exploration so no doubt I’ll be back at some point. I’m not sure exactly how to get into the main corridor network but judging by Flickr plenty have done so – if anyone who knows the place can offer some pointers please let me know.

Popularity: 38% [?]

It’s been a while since I managed to find time for exploring with a combination of weather, birthdays, grubby British weather and so on but this weekend I managed to get across to West Park (report due soon) and I managed to have a little poke around in the woods near RAF Finmere.

When I arrived in the area there seemed to be some activity on the airfield so I had to give that a miss but so I headed down to the woods, parking next to (but not in front of!) a gate by a public footpath. The woods seem to be used heavily for paintballing and there’s plastic tape up all over the place, I managed to tread carefully and avoid being shot but on a couple of occasions I did end up within a hundred yards of a group of paintballers but I don’t think anyone spotted me.

The majority of the structures remaining seem to be odd roofless bunker/trench type arrangements, I saw at least 7 or 8 of them dotted throughout the woods (bearing in mind I was avoiding the ‘live fire’ of the paintballers), I’m not sure what their original use would have been…

I didn’t have much time on my hands so I was probably only wandering around for an hour or so, I’d love to come back with someone who knows the area a bit better – if anyone’s interested please give me a shout.

Popularity: 15% [?]