It's that fear that gives you the rush :)
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It's that fear that gives you the rush :)
My first explore was a disused cobblers that used to be on my street - was ace - full of old stuff - and yes I did liberate a few things which I later gave to the local museum - well I was only 12!
I think my first actual explore was to a derelict Victorian Lido in the town where I was born - I was four, and I remember the remainder of copper blue painted changing stalls, a similarly painted octagonal cast iron fountain, several shallow 'footwash' pools and a big'un with a very scary straight drop deep end and a heavily weathered wooden diving board on ornate cast iron mounts. The bottom of the pool had those bizarre prehistoric looking water plants, that you used to get in children's dinosaur books, growing up from the cracked liner - y'know bit like aquatic cacti with fringes of leaves around the circumference every so often...
My grandad was a painter for the local council and it was his job to maintain the decor of the town's various swimming pools and lidos, back before everthing was centralized under one roof.
I distinctly remember him holding my hand as we side stepped around the rim of the main pool between some pricklies behind and the sheer drop to soggy prehistoric doom infront. It is like a photograph in my mind, it is that vivid... and I'd give anything to go back in time with my kit and shoot the place as it was then. It is now all just hardstanding from some been-and-gone caravan park.
St Peters Seminary in Cardross - wasnt my very first explore but was first most memorable one and I had the chance to revisit it quite a few times, funnily enough wasnt the modernist seminary that I liked most at the time it was the gothic Kilmahew house.
This was in the early to mid eighties - shame the place has degraded to its current state.
an older pic but exactly how it looked
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsalib/...7619481264162/
Whittingham was just up the road, went with BB for a mooch round and thought it was fab. Exploring kind of spiralled from there :)
Need to get back to some more asylums :D
Rodley Factory next to the canal used to go there all the time with friends, we had some right fun in there, my mate once sniffed this big can of liquid to see what it was and it knocked him out cold! Also we once set fire to four floors of it by mistake and got caught by the fire brigade but they caught us as we were trying to put it out so they let us go. After a warl I told my dad and he told me he worked in there when he left school, after that i was obcessed with finding something that related to him in there and used to bring all sorts of shite home to show him. It would of being a top explore if it was around now.
My first explore was a disused cinema in Liverpool in 1961. Some of the lads in my class said that they knew of a great place, so I joined them. The main entrance to the building was deeply recessed from the main road, so we just edged into it and squeezed through a missing pane in the doors. Once inside, it was like a labyrinth, with rooms and stairs everywhere. The Auditorium still had all the seats in it and one of the lads found that the cleaners lights still worked! The main lights had gone, leaving heavy cables dangling to floor level. These made great swings, all the way across the room! I remember finding the projection room, stripped but with a hand windlass to operate the screen curtains, which I did, peeping through the projection ports to see the result.
Having been closed for 3 years, everything was covered in dust as was I! Got a hiding for getting filthy, but it was worth it! Went back again and again until it was tinned up.
No pictures have ever surfaced of the inside, I have in my head, but lacking a USB port, cannot share them!
Did another one, but someone called the cops, who waited outside the front but we climbed out of a first floor rear window, down a drainpipe and split! For all I know, they could be waiting there still!
old cimemas /shops/pubs lived in a small village in county durham and all the kids did this no (no playstations 2 tv channels we were always outside exploring) and i aint grown up yet!
I've been interested in mooching around closed and abandoned sites since I can remember. My dad used to play cricket and my mother did the teas so I got dragged along. I had no interest in cricket and ended up exploring stuff near to wherever the away matches were. Closed railway lines, tunnels and the like. There was an old iron foundry near where we lived and I'd go exploring that sometimes. I once took a schoolmate there and got really pissed off with him because he wasn't interested in all the old stuff; he found a bottle of glue in the pattern maker's shop and went squirting it all over the place.
My first explore was the pump chamber of an unfinished water feature on our brand new council estate in 1968 In Newcastle when I was ten years old. It was housed under a concrete pyramid structure and easy access, a drain-type access hole simply covered with a large ply board. They then fitted a trapdoor but we worked out that a door handle from the house would fit the square section lock on the trapdoor.
Eventually the council fitted a padlock and that mode of entry was closed off. The pyramid is no more but the memory lives on via a rather quirky blog called http://kentonbar.blogspot.co.uk/