This was without a doubt one of my most dicey outings. All started off well – nice sunny day, met up with a couple of nice local Belgian lads, straight onto site and into the famous cooling tower for some ultra-wide-angle pictures.

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Crossing the canal and aproaching the huge powerstation building we were met with shouts of what I assume is eastern-european for ‘Fuck off’ bellowed from 5 storeys up out of a broken window. All hopes of discrete entry into an unoccupied powerstation were dashed and I left…by which I mean I legged it into the site and joined the group which had now swelled to 14 with the addition of two more guys from The Netherlands. At this point I should say that my ideal group to explore with would be 2 or 3 at a push. It’s more discrete, stealthy, manuverable and all-round sensible. If I am to be honest I would probably have to class our attempt to infiltrate a disused powerstation overrun with dubious ‘demolition workers’ in what amounted to a football team (incliding subs) as hopeless.

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What followed was a lot of wandering about, attempts to call down what we were discovering was a huge team of men who appeared to have complete run of the place with a view to offering a little incentive in exchance for passage inside. What we got instead was the appearance of a very angry man shouting for (we think) a cigarette in an unidentified language and carrying a slightly concerning container of some purple industrial chemical. As a rule I tend to avoid situations like this as much as possible as they do have a tendancy to go south quickly. We left without shots from inside the complex …but also without chemical burns so I call that a draw.

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As we climbed out the fence we were greeted by our friends at G4S who, while I don’t speak the native toung, I suspect was indicating that we come to have a word with him. Much as I like a good chat we had to be on our way so we left at a brisk pace pursued by our friend the guard and were basically chased out of town …onto the next of the day’s explores which I will post at a later date.

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Not a total success but, also, not a complete failure since I was very happy with the cooling tower shots I got as well as the snapshots from the outside of the main building.

MrD