The Lure of Urban Exploration

It is often the uninhabited spaces, the ones that may once have been inhabited but are no longer, that end up being the spaces richest with potential. Urban exploration plumbs the depths of this potential, delving into places that sit mouldering away forgotten and unnoticed, slowly crumbling, fading into dust. Abandoned structures are often seen as scars on the land, eyesores that need to be removed. But others hold that decay ought to be preserved or permitted to perpetuate, because in them is something else, something, perhaps, with meaning more profound than what the ordered society of today can provide. If an old factory quietly by itself gathers age and rust and dust, as paint crackles and curls in on itself, beams and roofs cave in, and there is no around to see, is it still beautiful?

Is it still meaningful?

For, after all, one cannot stand around and watch decay occurring. Its timescale is not one proportionate to the human lifetime. We cannot perceive change happening. We must leave it, forget about it. And then, one day, we return, happening upon it by chance. (Although it is likely to be not us ourselves, but another individual, belonging to some later time.) That’s what urban exploration is, really. Rediscovery, because this place is already in existence, been known by man. Discovery, because it has never been known in this state, this form. It is old, and it is new.

The history an abandoned structure carries is multi-layered. It has one history, the one in which it was alive and thriving and in use, and the one after it was left to ruin. Maybe it was partially demolished, expanded, or repurposed. Maybe one building was built over the ruins of another. Sifting through the layers in order to read this history is a sort of compacted, modified archaeology. It’s the exploration of an anthropological wilderness. Unlike a museum, where everything has been lifted from its original context, the abandoned structure and its contents have, much of the time, remained untouched. Each location sits there, with its multiplicity of pasts, perhaps isolated (a singular hospital building), perhaps interconnected (old sewer systems). And in a practical sense, the number of sites out there waiting to be explored is inexhaustible. Said an urban explorer during a home teams win soccer tips seminar: “For every building, for every structure, there exists an equal-sized hole in the ground.” It’s a thrilling thought, really.

Not all of these abandoned places, however, remain abandoned for long; unused space is quite the commodity these days. The higher population density of the UK, for instance, means a greater density of such sites that require less traveling to get to, but it also means that said abandoned places do not have much time to sit and stagnate. They’re sold, demolished, gutted and rebuilt, pushing urban exploration to progress at an accelerated rate- there seems to be more of a flurry around finding abandoned structures before they’re gone. Whereas in places with more land area to spare (the US, for instance), one might be more likely to find more massive building complexes, extensive underground systems, or entire ghost towns just sitting there, with no threat of disappearing anytime soon.

That said, urban exploration doesn’t have to be, strictly speaking, urban. A bullet point in some of my old notes lists places that could be of interest:

rural (ghost towns, farmsteads, plane graveyards), infrastructure, active sites, underground (mines, sewer systems), vanishing industry, institutions (prisons, churches, hospitals)

Urban exploration is unlikely to be sustainable as a large-scale, widespread activity; the intrinsically unsullied nature of such places relies on the fact they are largely forgotten. But keep an eye out for those places that people tend to ignore or not seem to see at all, because you might just be surprised.