Sick Britain

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.

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For those of you that haven’t joined already we’ve created a Flickr group called Sick Britain for sharing photos of derelict and abandoned places, we’re up to well over 1,000 photos there now so I thought I’d share some of my recently added favourites from people using a Creative Commons license (or where I have permission to use them)…

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

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[Sick Britain] I'd like to say thanks to Gibbo for the interview and wherever you live I definitely recommend you check out Northwest Exploration as it's probably the friendliest Urbex community out there.

Q1: Who are you?

Gibbo (real name Andy). A Yorkshire born but North-West based fella who now co-administers WWW.NWEX.CO.UK

Q2: Why do you do Urban Exploration?

Like every young lad, I was fascinated by empty and abandoned buildings, probably for the thrill / ghost aspect I was lucky enough to see the old Victoria Station, and parts of the old Orgreave Coking Plant (scene of the bloody miners battle on June 18th, 1984). The complex was huge and had it’s own sidings and an engine shed full of coal wagons and a couple of diesel engines. I just wish cameras weren’t so expensive to operate back then.

Q3: What's the best explore you've been on?

Without a doubt, St Joseph’s Seminary near Wigan.

Q4: What's worst explore you've been on?

Burtonwood Services. An interesting building, pretty much intact inside, but we stupidly lingered after the explore and got arrested in an extremely heavy-handed two police force operation.

Q5: If you could explore any site/facility in the world, what would it be?

It would be nice to see if Area 51 is actually everything it’s hyped up to be. In the UK it would have to be the Fun Ship the Duke of Lancaster over at Flint, North Wales.

Q6: Are there any pieces of kit that you'd recommend to others?

The trusty Maglite with an LED conversion. You lose the warm incandescence when light painting, but it gives an amazing throw. I’m also a big fan of clockwork torches. They’re cheap and always worth carrying as an emergency spare.

Q7: If you could give any tips to newbies or experienced explorers, what would they be?

For noobs: Don’t hang around a site after an explore!

For experienced explorers: Never forget your beginnings. You were a noob once and probably left in the cold and shunned by those more experienced. So give the noobs a chance. Over at NWEX that’s our philosophy and have certainly reaped the rewards – trips underground to some fantastic mines that you would never otherwise see, they’re not even listed on the internet and you’d never find the access! We even have a member who gives us trips in his plane!

Urbex isn’t a way of life, it’s a hobby – albeit a very unusual one. It’s also a hobby that is forever changing.

Q8: What would win in a fight: 1,000 chickens or 1 giant chicken the size of a thousand chickens?

1 giant chicken. It would just stand on the 1000 chickens.

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This was just a quick trip, I had some bits and bobs to pick up from the town and I thought I’d leave early to get some urbex in before too many people were up and about. I skirted around the edge of the site on what I presume is a disused railway line (it certainly had that feel to it), carrying on until I saw a clear hole in the fence that was easy enough to fit through.

Once on to the site I had a mooch around the silos, there’s not a great deal to see but they’re pretty impressive and very large structures which are quite a sight to behold if you’ve not seen that sort of thing before. There were a few bits of graffiti around and some wooden boards laid out as though some skaters had been around, though nothing looked overly vandalised which surprised me for a site in such a built up area. One cool and unexpected part of the site as what seemed to be a petrol station, complete with a petrol pump, I guess this must have been used to fuel the delivery trucks but I’ve never worked in a place like this so I can only make assumptions.

I had a little poke around the rest of the compound and saw a rat scampering into a warehouse, unfortunately I just missed getting a decent shot of the flighty little bugger but I managed to get his tail and some fur in frame. I didn’t really make it into any of the warehouse areas but got a quick look into what I presume must have been the offices which was utterly wrecked with collapsing ceilings and smashed up walls – the reasonably intact boiler and a set of drawers were the only things that gave a clue to its original purpose.

There’s quite a bit of exploring to be done at the site, though I’m not sure these days since this mini site-report is almost a year out of date, I may attempt to return at some point in the next few months and see what it’s like. In the end I abandoned the explore part through lack of time and also due to a mild suspicion that I wasn’t alone, in all likelihood it was probably just the wind or cat but my head was telling me that it could’ve been a chav or a crack addict so I decided not to venture into the huge dark warehouse and exited the site the same way I came in.  It might seem overly cautious to some but I’ve always been a fan of following my instinct, tens of thousands of years of evolution have made it what it is and I’m not one to argue with that!

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Every Urban Explorer needs a torch to help navigate around the dark, dank places we tend to find ourselves in but as a photographer you need both hands free in order to properly handle your camera gear. The natural solution is to buy a head torch, they’re available in pretty much all outdoor shops and cost as little as a tenner but unfortunately 95% of all the models I’ve seen in shops are rubbish for urbex photography.

The reason most head-torches are unsuitable is that they sit smack bang in the middle of your forehead which might be perfect for a caver but if you’re an SLR user you’ll find that when you bring your camera to your eye you’ll end up banging the body (or attached flash) right into the torch.  The other problem is that you’ll need the torch for exploring and to aid focusing but unless you’re light painting you won’t want the torch light to come out in your shot and trying to switch off a head torch whilst wearing gloves can be a pain.

Given all of my whinging above you’ve no doubt realised that I was getting fed-up with the situation but luckily I came across the Cyba-Lite Explorer, it’s effectively a small pen-torch (like a mini-Maglite) that comes with a clip-mount and an elastic head-strap…

From a general standpoint this is handy because you could clip it to a tripod, a baseball cap or whatever you like but the most useful part to me is that the clip mount swivels.  This means that I can wear it as a head torch but mounted on the side of my head, meaning that it won’t get in the way of my camera and that rather than fiddling with any switches I can just point it away from the subject of my photo if don’t want to capture the light.  My only criticism so far is that it could be brighter, it does well enough but there’s no way I could use it as my sole torch in the really dark places but hey – I carry my 4-cell Maglite as much for defence as for light!

You might think that I’m gushing with compliments about something pretty simple but having this torch has made exploring and taking photos so much simpler and hassle free that I just can’t help it – especially seeing as you can pick them up for less than a tenner (I paid about £14 though).  If anyone’s interested in picking one up there seems to be an offer on at 7dayshop.com where it’s going for £8.99 delivered.

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