To crawl through the hole in a corrugated iron fence. To crawl through into a different world where most people didn't tread. To wander into no mans land. A door had silently closed behind me, though it could only have only have been the wind.
These were the kind of places that I liked to work in.
These places had atmosphere. They had history, not just in the careful beauty of the brickwork, or the elegance of the beams and uprights, but everywhere. The brass plate bolted to the concrete, to level or calibrate, the clinging remnant of a long vanished machine. The peeling paint and tiled floors. Lockers that displayed only what treasure the pikeys had overlooked. Of annexes with office cubicles, strewn with the mouldy papers and plans spilling from the sorry desk that never left. Painted on the wall, lost hopes of a team winning the cup. The broken windows and pigeon shit. Now I was here, the clapping flap proceeding the coo of birds that perhaps expected the park breadcrumbs where they roost. Here and there, the signs still told you not to smoke. These places had an emptiness that you could not fathom.
I wished I had my camera.
Where the rusting rib cages of warehouses and workshops rose high into the grey skies, amidst the vague drizzle. The floors covered with decaying plasterboard and broken glass, or simply the dark grey greasy grit that seems to accumulate everywhere. Elsewhere, there were cables hanging from the brown decaying steelwork, and underneath the absence of roofing, a small lake of water had gathered to produce a thin quagmire of fines. Some patches had green algae and moss, in others rushes. As if surrounded by all this, some stubborn nature would not let go. In summer, the Buddleia would be strewn with butterflies, besides this wasteland. It would be hard to call it an oasis.
Was this what the future looked like?
It had made the geologist laugh, a thousand years was nothing to him. The eye blink before the made ground proceeded the natural. Perhaps this was why he was feign to care?
This next building looked curiously like a school I went to. Though the peeled paint from the walls and ceilings littered the floor. Half painted brickwork, half plaster. In one doorway, you could see the smashed remnants of hand basins and toilet bowls. The torn pipework leaving only rough holes in the wall to trace its path from. A cistern tank lay broken and discarded to the floor, the down pipe still intact, because plastic had no scrap value.
At the end of the corridor, there was a high roofed building, reminiscent of a gymnasium in all it's emptiness. On one wall, electrical junction boxes and switchboards lay open. Along another side, the floor was damp and slightly green from the broken skylights. My boots left footprints. There were bolts protruding from the concrete at the corners of vague rectangles that betrayed the positions of missing machine bases. On the far wall, there were wooden shelves. They looked like miniature church pews in their form and colour, but were filled with slotted alcoves all labelled in inches. Underneath there were boards with hooks and nails, atop the outlines of departed tools. It looked like a crime scene, an execution at the ironmongers.
There were two sets of double doors here. Through the wired glass windows, I could see a covered courtyard, two iron gas cylinders upright against the far wall. The doors were locked. Another one to the side was not. It was a stairwell.
At the bottom of the stairwell, the wall was covered with an enormous fungal bloom. It spread across the wall like contorted ripples. The curious ridges were brown to the crest and then ochre underneath. Toward the centre, the metal housing of a lightswitch still partially visible. Not quite swamped by the waves of fungus. It didn't seem healthy to be next to this, I had an urge to hold my breath for sake of the spores. Back towards the stairwell. Happy that they were concrete after I had kicked them. Happy they were likely to take my weight, I ascended. At the top of the stairs, I met a deserted office.
It was a mess of lockers, their doors flung open, the floor strewn with detritus, papers, and small cardboard trays. The contents of these trays missing, too many to have been simply discarded. There was an office chair in amongst these things and what looked curiously like a video tape. On the shelves along the wall next to a desk, there was a cumbersome old IBM PC. Some of the cardboard trays were not empty, one contained a number of metal files. In another tray, bags of tungsten carbide ball bearings, labelled with measurements still written mostly in inches On one label a date read 27/11/81. Had this really been untouched for a quarter of a century?
In another of the cupboards, I found a wooden box. Slightly grubby and reminiscent of then articles my Granddad used to keep his draughtsmans instruments in. The pens, pencils, springbow compasses and other facets of his work. It had been a long time since I had seen such a thing. It looked almost identical, with it's brass hinges and clasps (the clasps were as flimsy as I remembered them), though nothing grand or special. Perhaps this was the reason that few of these things remained. Was there a name written in biro on the corner? The letters didn't make sense.
Trace your steps back, traverse to the other end of a site, to make your way back out.
Two lights above a door lintel. The green cover smashed, the red intact. It looked like a studio, but the details engraved on the accompanying plate marked the lights as a facet of an electrical transformer. A transformer that had long since gone, gone with the machines it supplied power to.
Past mounds of fly tipped rubbish from who knows where. Some mostly tyres and car parts, rusting oil cans and the charred lump of what used to be a car battery. Others with broken fridges, their foam spilling out, and what looked like the entire contents of a kitchen piled in heap. Nearby I saw three toilet bowls clustered together, one even with the seat intact. Littered here and there, the spiral remnants and sliced up sheathing from armoured cable.
There had been squatters here, sitting on old milk crates covered with a carpet tile in the semi darkness from dirty windows. So much footwear, odd shoes and a pair of wellington boots. On the wall, a coat and hat still hung up in the anticipation that they had never been left behind. Maybe they hadn't? The floor was a mess. Slithers of cable sheathing discarded here and there. Piles of stuff that looked like old clothes, or rucksacks, but somehow unrecognisable. Scatterings and discrete collections of single serving sugar packets and a bag of greasy fish and chip papers. On a bench, there was a curious table setting, a new and cheerful looking mug, odd cutlery and napkins neatly spaced above a tray. It looked expectant of a meal. By the doorway, a collection of site notices. One exclaiming that men were working overhead had been placed on top of another milk crate. On this makeshift table, there was a videotape titled “understanding depression”. Its good intentions of no use in this place.
There were some buildings to the rear of the site, with roofs relatively intact, with only the ceiling tiles that hung in such a way as to betray their intentions. To join their colleagues already gathered on the floor. For these and other places here, I'd wished again for the foresight to bring my lid, a site hat inherited from my parents garage. Inside one room, there were rows of old tyres. Car tyres, tractor tyres and lorry tyres.
There were piles of crushed brick and concrete accumulated in several of the doorways. One of the rooms in the block looked like the floor had been purposely cleared. It seemed curious, because half the wall was missing. Elsewhere, who ever had taken the trouble to begin bricking up the doorway had also seemingly taken to sweeping the veneer of glass and detritus into neat piles underneath the decaying corrugated iron roof. Though none of it made perfect sense, or even reasonable sense. There was asbestos lagging scattered across the threshold here. The white strands were long enough to have been an old mans hair. Just outside, the first strands still wet from the drizzle. Rendered benign for now. The other clumps undercover, next to the sections of pipework that they used to cling to. To be given a wide berth. Not to be disturbed.
There was a weighbridge by the chained up gates and a windowless office enclosed with cinder blocks. Not just one chain, but three, and the gaps in the gate covered by a mish-mash of iron grill and wooden planks. Not far away, there was a rusting tanker lorry, with flat tyres and missing windscreen. The cab was tipped forward as if a despairing mechanic had simply given up and left. Close by, a storage tank hung above its bund, with hose and filler nozzle dangling toward the floor. It was nearly full, the rainwater brown and a rusty sludge collected at the bottom. I had to wonder about the strange tracks that ran around the perimeter of the site, and the curious abundance of spent shotgun cartridges.
Of what had gone before, I couldn't say, though would have liked to. Another harbinger of change, with rigs and machines at my command. The vanguard of what the developers marketed as a 'new future'. If the walls were against the wall, what would they say? What anecdotes of scenes and lives gone before might they nervously recount? To list who did what, that we began to undo? Would they plead for these things, or spit at the bucket?
“I saw all this and have survived so much, and now you have come for me?”
It would be awkward faced with this, more awkward than the usual objections of bored busy bodies...
These were the kind of places that I liked to work in.
These places had atmosphere. They had history, not just in the careful beauty of the brickwork, or the elegance of the beams and uprights, but everywhere. The brass plate bolted to the concrete, to level or calibrate, the clinging remnant of a long vanished machine. The peeling paint and tiled floors. Lockers that displayed only what treasure the pikeys had overlooked. Of annexes with office cubicles, strewn with the mouldy papers and plans spilling from the sorry desk that never left. Painted on the wall, lost hopes of a team winning the cup. The broken windows and pigeon shit. Now I was here, the clapping flap proceeding the coo of birds that perhaps expected the park breadcrumbs where they roost. Here and there, the signs still told you not to smoke. These places had an emptiness that you could not fathom.
I wished I had my camera.
Where the rusting rib cages of warehouses and workshops rose high into the grey skies, amidst the vague drizzle. The floors covered with decaying plasterboard and broken glass, or simply the dark grey greasy grit that seems to accumulate everywhere. Elsewhere, there were cables hanging from the brown decaying steelwork, and underneath the absence of roofing, a small lake of water had gathered to produce a thin quagmire of fines. Some patches had green algae and moss, in others rushes. As if surrounded by all this, some stubborn nature would not let go. In summer, the Buddleia would be strewn with butterflies, besides this wasteland. It would be hard to call it an oasis.
Was this what the future looked like?
It had made the geologist laugh, a thousand years was nothing to him. The eye blink before the made ground proceeded the natural. Perhaps this was why he was feign to care?
This next building looked curiously like a school I went to. Though the peeled paint from the walls and ceilings littered the floor. Half painted brickwork, half plaster. In one doorway, you could see the smashed remnants of hand basins and toilet bowls. The torn pipework leaving only rough holes in the wall to trace its path from. A cistern tank lay broken and discarded to the floor, the down pipe still intact, because plastic had no scrap value.
At the end of the corridor, there was a high roofed building, reminiscent of a gymnasium in all it's emptiness. On one wall, electrical junction boxes and switchboards lay open. Along another side, the floor was damp and slightly green from the broken skylights. My boots left footprints. There were bolts protruding from the concrete at the corners of vague rectangles that betrayed the positions of missing machine bases. On the far wall, there were wooden shelves. They looked like miniature church pews in their form and colour, but were filled with slotted alcoves all labelled in inches. Underneath there were boards with hooks and nails, atop the outlines of departed tools. It looked like a crime scene, an execution at the ironmongers.
There were two sets of double doors here. Through the wired glass windows, I could see a covered courtyard, two iron gas cylinders upright against the far wall. The doors were locked. Another one to the side was not. It was a stairwell.
At the bottom of the stairwell, the wall was covered with an enormous fungal bloom. It spread across the wall like contorted ripples. The curious ridges were brown to the crest and then ochre underneath. Toward the centre, the metal housing of a lightswitch still partially visible. Not quite swamped by the waves of fungus. It didn't seem healthy to be next to this, I had an urge to hold my breath for sake of the spores. Back towards the stairwell. Happy that they were concrete after I had kicked them. Happy they were likely to take my weight, I ascended. At the top of the stairs, I met a deserted office.
It was a mess of lockers, their doors flung open, the floor strewn with detritus, papers, and small cardboard trays. The contents of these trays missing, too many to have been simply discarded. There was an office chair in amongst these things and what looked curiously like a video tape. On the shelves along the wall next to a desk, there was a cumbersome old IBM PC. Some of the cardboard trays were not empty, one contained a number of metal files. In another tray, bags of tungsten carbide ball bearings, labelled with measurements still written mostly in inches On one label a date read 27/11/81. Had this really been untouched for a quarter of a century?
In another of the cupboards, I found a wooden box. Slightly grubby and reminiscent of then articles my Granddad used to keep his draughtsmans instruments in. The pens, pencils, springbow compasses and other facets of his work. It had been a long time since I had seen such a thing. It looked almost identical, with it's brass hinges and clasps (the clasps were as flimsy as I remembered them), though nothing grand or special. Perhaps this was the reason that few of these things remained. Was there a name written in biro on the corner? The letters didn't make sense.
Trace your steps back, traverse to the other end of a site, to make your way back out.
Two lights above a door lintel. The green cover smashed, the red intact. It looked like a studio, but the details engraved on the accompanying plate marked the lights as a facet of an electrical transformer. A transformer that had long since gone, gone with the machines it supplied power to.
Past mounds of fly tipped rubbish from who knows where. Some mostly tyres and car parts, rusting oil cans and the charred lump of what used to be a car battery. Others with broken fridges, their foam spilling out, and what looked like the entire contents of a kitchen piled in heap. Nearby I saw three toilet bowls clustered together, one even with the seat intact. Littered here and there, the spiral remnants and sliced up sheathing from armoured cable.
There had been squatters here, sitting on old milk crates covered with a carpet tile in the semi darkness from dirty windows. So much footwear, odd shoes and a pair of wellington boots. On the wall, a coat and hat still hung up in the anticipation that they had never been left behind. Maybe they hadn't? The floor was a mess. Slithers of cable sheathing discarded here and there. Piles of stuff that looked like old clothes, or rucksacks, but somehow unrecognisable. Scatterings and discrete collections of single serving sugar packets and a bag of greasy fish and chip papers. On a bench, there was a curious table setting, a new and cheerful looking mug, odd cutlery and napkins neatly spaced above a tray. It looked expectant of a meal. By the doorway, a collection of site notices. One exclaiming that men were working overhead had been placed on top of another milk crate. On this makeshift table, there was a videotape titled “understanding depression”. Its good intentions of no use in this place.
There were some buildings to the rear of the site, with roofs relatively intact, with only the ceiling tiles that hung in such a way as to betray their intentions. To join their colleagues already gathered on the floor. For these and other places here, I'd wished again for the foresight to bring my lid, a site hat inherited from my parents garage. Inside one room, there were rows of old tyres. Car tyres, tractor tyres and lorry tyres.
There were piles of crushed brick and concrete accumulated in several of the doorways. One of the rooms in the block looked like the floor had been purposely cleared. It seemed curious, because half the wall was missing. Elsewhere, who ever had taken the trouble to begin bricking up the doorway had also seemingly taken to sweeping the veneer of glass and detritus into neat piles underneath the decaying corrugated iron roof. Though none of it made perfect sense, or even reasonable sense. There was asbestos lagging scattered across the threshold here. The white strands were long enough to have been an old mans hair. Just outside, the first strands still wet from the drizzle. Rendered benign for now. The other clumps undercover, next to the sections of pipework that they used to cling to. To be given a wide berth. Not to be disturbed.
There was a weighbridge by the chained up gates and a windowless office enclosed with cinder blocks. Not just one chain, but three, and the gaps in the gate covered by a mish-mash of iron grill and wooden planks. Not far away, there was a rusting tanker lorry, with flat tyres and missing windscreen. The cab was tipped forward as if a despairing mechanic had simply given up and left. Close by, a storage tank hung above its bund, with hose and filler nozzle dangling toward the floor. It was nearly full, the rainwater brown and a rusty sludge collected at the bottom. I had to wonder about the strange tracks that ran around the perimeter of the site, and the curious abundance of spent shotgun cartridges.
Of what had gone before, I couldn't say, though would have liked to. Another harbinger of change, with rigs and machines at my command. The vanguard of what the developers marketed as a 'new future'. If the walls were against the wall, what would they say? What anecdotes of scenes and lives gone before might they nervously recount? To list who did what, that we began to undo? Would they plead for these things, or spit at the bucket?
“I saw all this and have survived so much, and now you have come for me?”
It would be awkward faced with this, more awkward than the usual objections of bored busy bodies...
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