Life on the Grid

I just don’t know where to start with this. I thought when we did Weston Point back in May it was about the peak of ‘power station exploring’ for the year but after this place im not so sure. It all started with a recce on an interesting looking building, no real expectations, then it just kept coming!

Wikipedia can provide an overview of the history of the stations that have existed on this site and as you can see it states ‘All three have now been demolished’.. Well yes the boiler houses and turbine halls are long gone. The site is now in use for self storage depots and even the Barking Sunday market. HOWEVER as with many old CEGB sites all is most defiantly not lost!

Our initial port of call was the remaining yet derelict 33kv Substation. Its easy to spot being close the the road and fairly easily accessed being part of the market site rather then the container yard next door. Its not the only substation left on the site but it is the most obviously ‘derelict’ building. First trip was an evening recce. At first we were pleasantly surprised to find simply ‘something’ inside. The building was a true relic of the CEGB days with crazy enamel signs, a nice battery room and a very nice Mather and Platt sprinkler system still in situe. Poking around we had the first moment of epicness. Peering down through holes in the floor where cables once ran we were met with the warm glow of sodium light shining back up at us.. This place had tunnels! and what did we find on the wall? yep a bloody map of them!! (with access and egress points clearly marked no less!) of course it wasnt going to be that simple was it.. All access points were concreted. I scoured the floors of the building for hours before ‘epic moment number two’ reared is head and provided an ignorable distraction..

As we approached the end of the building i stepped outside and on the wall above, just about at the limit of my finger tip reach there was a door ever so slightly ajar. I strained to reach and getting my finger tips around the corner managed to swing it open. Two steps taken back, i fumble for the torch and without being too obvious shine it up though to doorway. We had found what we came for!!! CONTROL ROOOOOOM!!!!!

Next up was the control room and office block.. Now.. i hear what your saying! didnt we just have the control room?? well no.. you had A control room. Not THE control room. Now on the third visit. Remember that tunnel map from the first? Yep you probably noticed to too! ‘CONTROL ROOM AND OFFICE BLOCK’ well this was our next target and things started to get a little more tricky. This building was once the main entrance, offices and control room for the whole of A and B station not just a poncy little 33kv substation! you can imagine we were a little keen to see what was in there. Blocking our path was some kind of cockney pikey death gauntlet of men in transit tippers and barky illegal dog breeds. Verdict. Not do able in the daytime, not if you value your health anyway! First we tired asking, didn’t work, man just let us look through the window at the tantalising ceiling! Going at dawn was the only real way to get a decent look and a decent set of pictures but it didn’t leave much of a window. By now it was late October and the clocks were about to change giving that valuble extra hour of daylight that was needed to get in, explore and get out before the men arrived and blocked my escape.

Im not sure if i was disappointed by what was inside.. i dont think its really possible to be disappointed after stumbling on a place like this but it was a bit of a knock back to find the control panels had been removed. High hopes we dashed slighly.. that was until we found a way into the basement.. FUCK its happening again! Expectation was an empty set of rooms. Reality was a basement CRAMMED with gear! WW2 stencils on the wall, more epic switches, signs and gauges then you can shake a stick at all old as fuck!

Back to that very first trip again and THAT map. I had one more idea how we could access these  tunnels and it only bloody worked! Talk about the Barking Catacombs! The whole site is hollow! We spent hours exploring. Take the tunnel, come up against a brick wall, work your way around, carry on exploring, reach the next bricked up door or whatever, find a way around, keep going. Pics really dont do the maze much justice.. The desired destination was the Thames cable tunnels but so far they seem elusive. We were way off our map so flying a bit blind but it seemed as if the network had been quite well sealed in that sort of direction. Eventually we ended up under the live 132kv substation ‘C’ and were met with several anti pikey measures that prompted us to GTFO!

Just remember, this post was brought to you by the guy who defiantly never finds anything good in London

Clydebank Catacombes

God knows how i can explain this all in words and still get across the seeming insanity of the days proceedings but il have a go! All il say is, sometimes exploration has a habit of throwing you a curve ball!

Basically we had been exploring for three days, getting a grand total of about 2 hours of car snooze and 2 hours of pure tramping it up snooze. Bedtime appeared to have moved itself from ‘night time’ to ’1 o’clock in the afternoon’ and what with a fresh night of crane climbing looming we decided to take advantage of the rare (in Scotland anyway) sunny afternoon by getting a few hours shut eye in the local derelict swimming baths basement.. Grand..

All went well, i slept for a bit, woke up around 6pm, the clocks had changed the day before so luckily it was still light and a few stray rays were seeping around the nearby manhole cover. I had decided in advance to get up before sunset and get a few shots of the baths upstairs while we still had the light. Trouble is i had been here before and last time around we discovered the baths were full of PIR sensors and as soon as you got in it was time to get out again.

After this point things started to stray from the plan a little. Heading up the the baths we were distracted, a door lead off into some tunnels and we decided it was best we have a quick look before potentially dropping the bells. We took the tunnel.. and then the next, and the next and then the stairs and then the next set of stairs and so on.. The place was a maze, i was fully expecting to pop out in the Aztec Zone at any moment tbfh!

With little time to take photos we pressed on until we came to a door.. ‘stage door’.. wtf? stage door?? since when did a public baths have a ‘stage door’?

Then it began

 

If you want to see a slightly more comprehensive set of photos, not taken in some kind of sleep deprived mad man rush try looking here

God Save the King!

As far as high stuff goes im generally not really that interested if its not the ‘tallest’ in its specific city, country, or even more recently, continent! Id make an exception for something that is pretty significant. One of the BT towers or maybe the Liverpool’s Liver building would float my boat no doubt, but just because its over 10 stories doesn’t mean im gonna run there to ‘do an urbex’.. That sort of thing all seems a bit meh to me..

I guess then, London’s Kings Reach Tower will be one that breaks my mould somewhat! Its not the tallest, most interesting or most significant, its simply a decent hight block with amazing views of nearly every London landmark going. It greatly reminded me of the old Southwark towers that once stood in place of the shard. All it lacked was the roof garden complete with park benches!

Dont mention the antics!

A Door to the End of the World

Welcome to the next chapter from Spring Quarry. I was barely back topside before a return was being planned.. After a few phone calls i hooked up with Rooks who was in the area on parental pleasing duties.  We studied some on-line maps  for a while and after some deliberation decided that while the sands entrance was open we’d better make the most of it. I knew there was areas of the Bristol factory that i had missed, the most obvious of these being the canteen. This part of the quarry had been quite well documented in the past as it contains some quite frankly stunning world war two murals, they were not marked on the maps but this did not phase us, Rooks being the arty type we made these our main objective for the evening.. How hard could it be?!

At this point i really didn’t  have any idea what a total epic the night would transform itself into. Id pretty much written off our chances of accessing the grail that is ‘Burlington’ through sands. At the time we were only aware of two doors, door ‘C’ that i had found locked a matter of hours earlier and door ‘D’ that i had it on good authority that was also impenetrable! Upon entering the quarry for the second time that day we this time headed east, out of the navy stores area, into an area that had laid untouched since the end of the war in 1945. We soon found D door and verified that it was indeed pretty solid. After a few more minuets of walking we found our main objective.

The canteen was indeed very good. The 1940s murals could have been painted yesterday and the canteens menu was still scrawled on a stone blackboard in ancient handwriting. Rooks was in her essence and we spent quite a while here photographing and messing about. For the first time in this saga since the Tunnel Quarry affair it felt like we were uncovering new ground. The last few weeks had been frustrating. Sitting at home 150+ miles away i had been receiving snippets of information along the lines of ‘this is open’ and that door was locked’, being sent the odd photo of  this and that, but i had heard nothing about the canteen and what was going to follow afterwards.

We finished up in the canteen but seeing as we still had a few hours before i needed to depart and get back to the real world we carried on looking around the older sections of quarry.  One thing that had caught my eye was a drainage channel that ran east-west across pretty much all of the accessible area. Sometimes it was below the floor and sometimes in a concrete channel on the surface. It seemed logical that it must be going somewhere so we hopped in and started to follow it east. Upon reaching the wall of the aircraft factory to our delight we found the channel ducked down below the wall and carried on underneath. There were bars but at a crawl you could pass through and upon popping out the other side we found ourself in seemingly abandoned mine workings. We didn’t really realise it at the time but the quest had reached its next level, we had entered the East Lung.

The purpose of the lungs was basically to supply clean, dry and latterly fallout free air to the factories and bunkers in the main quarry. Air was draw from both East and West Lungs as well as through Clift Quarry’s ‘Wind Tunnel’. The idea being that air drawn through miles of disuse quarry workings would allow any contamination to settle out. As we entered the East Lung the drainage channel headed into underground pipes and away out of view. We were left standing in what i have to say were the familiar surroundings of abandoned bath stone quarry workings. I was a little worried about getting lost in here but in the deadly quiet it was still possible to hear water running down the drainage pipes and with a manhole every 50 yards or so it wasn’t to taxing to keep following it. After a few minuets of following the sounds came our first shock of the night. Turning the corner in the darkness my torch picked out florescent yellow. On investigation we found a road, not an abandoned road but a scrupulously clean well maintained road flanked by the same yellow barrier ropes i had seen in Tunnel a few weeks earlier.. The only question for us at this point was which way next??!

We chose left. The excitement was really starting to build by now. This road obviously went somewhere and an educated guess would say that somewhere would be our ultimate goal, The Central Government War Headquarters, aka. Burlington, aka. ‘the grail’.. Then we turned a corner and saw it. Illuminated by a single florescent strip light, quite possible the best moment of my life to be fucking honest! We were on such a high to be making progress we didn’t even care we were trespassing on live MOD property any more and turning to corner in what up until that point had been essentially a dark abandoned stone quarry to see such a totally unexpected sight blew our minds just a little bit!

The door was covered top to bottom in cork. Who knows why! A single CCTV camera overlooked the area. I desperately wanted to try the handle but for now we decided it would be more sensible to have a look around the immediate vicinity first. Then it happened again!! we turned another corner back into the darkness and a small red light beckoned me closer. It was a light switch, so naturally i flicked it on expecting it to illuminate the immediate area. That it did but in such a stunning way i just have to mention it here. Normally when you flick a light switch the lights come on. Simple as that. Here it was like some sort of movie scene. Upon flicking the switch you could hear some sort of breaker engage and one by one the tunnel lights flickered into life. It just kept on going seemingly lasting for several seconds, the tunnel getting longer with every bulb.  The first thing you think is ‘drain’ the brickwork reminded me of the larger London sewers just cleaner and generally much more satisfying. This was the airway. In the 1940s quarry air would have been sucked down here into the lung and off around the munitions factories but after Burlington was built it had been seemingly abandoned and used for some kind of drainage purposes. In the distance we could here water. Time for more investigation.

Reaching the end of the airway the circular tunnel turned back to rectangular and a mesh fence blocked our path. Peering through the fence we spotted the next surprise of the night.. A bloody boat! Quickly over the fence we surveyed the scene. Above us rose another air shaft , the bottom of which was flooded, much like the example i have found in the aircraft factory earlier in the day. Water tricked into the pool out of some pipework on the far side of this little underground lake.  It was tempting to try and float the boat but with time pressing and THAT door to check out we settled for a comedy photo or two and a chance to sit down and reflect on what had just happened!

By now we had pretty much worked out where this all fitted into the bigger picture of Spring. This area was all to do with drainage and water supply.  Upon further mooching we discovered where large areas of the east lung had been bricled up and turned into massive underground reservoirs. Following the road away from the door there were pump houses, substations and rooms full of valves. On later trips we would return to explore the rest of the East Lung discovering yet more water related features, old mine cranes and strange vents into Tunnel Quarry next door. For now however there was one last bit of unfinished business!

By now it was gone 1am and i knew i had to be back on the road for 2 to stand any chance of getting home for work. We mulled over whether to brave the CCTV and try the door now or whether to simply return in the day or two and try it then. There really was only one sensible choice. Go home! But then again in reality there was a good chance that the mine would be sealed tomorrow and the opportunity to see what was behind that door was something i was more then prepared to get caught, loose my job and get anally raped by the RMP for! Pulling a sicky was not going to be a issue! (sorry boss!).

So back to the door… We took the plunge and walked in view of the camera. Hands on handle.. Turn.. Bloody hell it turned!..  Now pull.. Holy fuck Its opening!! The door slowly swung open like some kind of epic bank vault.. Inside.. Yep another door! It was an airlock. No sirens but was someone watching?? We closed the first door behind us. Now in the airlock.. A phone hung on the wall with a small phone book scrawled in black pen on the quarry wall. 1. Gatehouse 2. Operations Cent etc.. We paused for a second to savour the moment then went for the next handle… Clunk.. It turned…

I pulled…

 

 

tick tick tick BOOM!

Sometime during 2009 i was shown some photos from a Scottish friend of mine of what can only be described as one of the best places ive ever had the privilege of witnessing.  It took me nearly two years to get around to going along and seeing it for myself but earlier this year we bit the bullet and got it done. For once i will choose not to name the location, its not because i want to keep lame secrets, its simply because ruffling the feathers of its guardians is by all accounts not a wise move! What i can tell you is its big and not just big in terms of exploring locations, big in terms of square miles! The 2,000+ acre site is home to 3 main factory units for the manufacture of ammunition and explosives along with many ancillary buildings such as power plants, medical centres and the like. 99% of the site now lays abandoned and due to the nature of what is produced in the 1% that is still live security is obviously tight.. Still when you have a place like this sitting there a few men with guns shouldn’t be an excuse to miss out..

Our day started out at around 4am. Somehow we had managed to get no sleep the previous night and had gained little more than 2 hours on the day. We chose to grin and bare it however as we knew we had to be there before sun up for the power plant and a few other highlights i defiantly was not up for missing out on!

We had a bit of scare near the power plant as a car sped passed but in the dark they had no chance of spotting us. As it started to get light the place really came into its own. We made our way over to the ‘Cathedral’ and then on around to the second pencil like cooling tower as the sun stated to come up.. Its fair to say i was a tad frustrated at this point, the low light made for poor photos and our guide was pressing on relentlessly past so many amazing looking industrial buildings it was gutting we were not going inside them! Of course as we would later find out there was method to his madness, to go in everything you would be there months!

The next few hours were a blur, credit to our guide, it kept getting better and better as we went culminating at the Nitrocellulose and Gun Cotton plants. Massive complexes that on their own would stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the greatest industrial plants the UK has ever seen! The average flickr geek would wet themselves at the sight of the pealing paint in these buildings alone..

This place was full of oddities. Originally a country estate at its centre we stumbled across the old manor house but being alarmed to the hilt it was not wise to mess with it.  Moving on through the shell pressing area we ended up at the drum blending section, a set of maybe 4 or 5 heavily protected buildings that housed shapely copper vessels used to mix chemicals. The examples pictured here were known as ‘Sweetie Barrels’ as they were in fact mixers intended to be used in the confectionery industry.. (See im full of interesting facts!)

After the delights of the blenders and shell presses we made our way on to the cordite press area. I had previously visited the near identical (yet pretty fucked) examples at ICI Noble’s Ardeer works so it was defiantly a bonus to see what they should look like pretty much intact! Things became a bit of a blur again after swiftly pressing on down narrow gauge rail tracks and across wide open roadways where the risk of detection rocketed. Then we reached it, the most dangerous area of the factory and probably the reason for the morgue we had seen some hours earlier! The nitroglycerin mixing plant. Believe it or not this place has blown up many times!

With that we moved on again, this time to the motherload. The power plant was an amazing start to the day but this was a better finish. The gun cotton factories took my breath away. Mark my words such awesomeness on this scale does not exist outside this site.

and with that we were gone.. (to bed at 1:30 pm!)

Boing Boing

Before you read this post i suggest to refresh your memory of our ‘Escape from Tunnel Quarry’ it gives a bit of background to both the Corsham underworld and our previous adventures within it. Essential reading if you are to follow the story any further.

Our foray into Tunnel ended on a slightly sour note but far from put us off, it had only really served to wet our appetites for more. Some of our associates had slightly better luck with the survey team route and had passed around a few tantalising photos of what lay on offer. It was very clear however that Tunnel was not the way forward. It had alarms, CCTV and people, none of which i particularly like and all of which pretty much ruled out any possibility of getting a seriously comprehensive look around. (Besides that the survey ended nearly as soon as it had begun.. i wonder why!!)

Almost as soon as the infamous red door in Clift had slammed shut we were already talking about a way to bypass it once more. We sidelined Clift and Tunnel and started to explore some of the other options available. The obvious place to start was a small quarry linked to the south of the Spring/Tunnel complex that goes by the name of  ‘Sands’.  The history behind this compact set of workings is quite complex so you will have to bare with me a little. It had previously been used as an emergency escape route for the MOD areas and had its very own ‘Red Door’ that had been bricked up long in the past. It is no longer owned by the MOD and therefore access to this bricked up door had been possible for quite some years prior to me becoming interested in the quarrys. Additionally rumours surrounding it appeared to have been rife for just as long! We knew people had tunnelled through the surrounding rock in the past but the lack of photos available of what lay beyond suggested that things were not quite as simple as they seemed, indeed many tails existed of PIRs, cameras and even vibration sensors that would detect any attempt to tunnel in and alert the boys in blue (or green in this case!) Luckily for us however a few months previously to the Tunnel escapade all these rumours had been systematically quashed when some guys i know headed down the mine on a normal ‘sight seeing’ tour of the Wiltshire underground and were confronted with a hole. They couldn’t quite believe their luck but naturally were rather cautious about just haw far to probe past it. They had a look all right but when they returned the next day for more the hole had disappeared.. concreted back up from the inside. Fast forward a week or so and another snippet of information came our way. People had been caught in there and with that once again it was not looking a good option for that ‘comprehensive look’ i was after.

Why am i telling you all this? well im basically trying to explain the metaphorical mountain we seemed to be facing at this point. It was clear we were not the first or only people to be probing the area but equally it seemed as if everyone who got near the place were at best coming away with angry people in hot pursuit or at worst in the back of an RMP wagon. Never the less in the end we got our chance and no matter what the consequences could be we were always going to take it. After a few months the hole re-appeared and i got my first real chance to cautiously step foot into the legendary Spring Quarry.

People had picked up tickets for simply being in the area after dark so i thought it best to buck the trend and go for a daytime visit. This worked nicely and i was soon through the tight slot in Sands and carefully trudging through white washed mine workings. Despite knowing the quarry layout quite well it took a while to get my bearings. I had neglected to take a map thinking that if the apparently likely happened and i met someone not overly happy with my presence down there id be better of posing as a lost caver than a cold war obsessed ‘urban explorer’ dead set of infiltrating the heart of their empire!

The area i found myself in was familiarly dark dank and abandoned. Once part of the Bristol Aircraft Company shadow factory, after the war it was pressed into a new use as a massive Royal Navy store. The conversion had left only the main infrastructure intact. where once machines would have sat now cages and shelves took their place.

Being alone down there my ears were at maximum sensitivity and every now and again muffled sounds seemed to reverberate around quarry walls. After investigating i soon came across my first air shaft. What a sight that was! The shaft was epic in itself but the fan that served it was something else.

Moving on it wasn’t long before more long disused shafts and epic diesel generators started to rear their heads. By this point i was gaining some confidence the place was not patrolled regularly and i might actually get away with being down there after all. The hours passed quickly. In testament to the size of even this small area of Spring it was 4 hours before i found myself at the next obstacle. Yet another ‘Red Door’! Although i didn’t know it at the time this would become known as ‘C’ door and would play an important part in the coming month. For now it just seemed like a big locked door and with no obvious way to progress forward, content with what i had achieved, i headed back out..

The next chapter is on its way soon.

Sweet Tooth

Every now and again there’s a big takeover, factorys get closed and people loose their jobs. During 2010 it was the turn of Cadburys to be bought out by American food giant ‘Kraft’ and with that the fate of its Somerdale Plant in Bristol was all but sealed. A big part of the ‘point’ of exploring stuff for me has always been the value of the photos myself and my peers take in recording, and more importantly informing the public of quite what goes on after the dust has started to settle. Its one thing reading about these situations in a newspaper at the time of announcement but they are all too soon forgotten. I like to think some of the photos i take go some way to highlighting the shit that is actually aloud to happen in this country! Somerdale is not just an awesome factory, its an awesome place! A stunning location, amazing building, loads of history. It has everything a company, place or indeed job could need.  In a mere 6 or 7 years in this game ive seen 100s of these places go and this is one of the worst. Will it ever stop? I doubt it.

Its been a long time coming and to be fair, after all the hype, i was totally prepared to be disappointed with the place. However as it tuns out i had nothing at all to worry about, the place totally delivered on all levels. A great place, great experience and most defiantly great explore! I was starting to get that feeling we were missing the boat here. The place had been ‘almost’ deserted for the last 4 months and we had spent several hours over the winter months sitting in the bushes scoping it out. It didn’t quite feel right back then but by April it felt like now or never.

Manufacturing had ceased and the strip out had started. In reality however little had gone anywhere yet. We started in the power plant. I had been tipped off that this was good but again, i was ultimately prepared for alot less than we found. It was defiantly love at first sight as we emerged from the basement stairwell into an awesome turbine hall, a little lacking in the turbine department nowadays maybe, with only a single little set in situe but it didn’t really matter, the room was more then a good start. After a little poke about we braved the door to the boiler house, the place was far from derelict and we knew for sure there was a boiler man on site.. luckily for us however he wasn’t in there!

Moving on to the factory proved much more tricky but with a bit of luck on our side we made it in. There was no way we were in the position to cover the whole place. It was both vast and still pretty damn live as well! We made it a goal to reach ‘the’ sign and on our way appeared to be passing through the Double Decker and Picnic lines. On the way back a slightly different route took us through fudge and a few other odds and ends before a close call prematurely ended the tour.