The heaviest cornerstone of global UE has always been structural abandonment; assuming the form classically as the derelict building or place, slanged with versatility in the British scene as the derp. Derp has no official etymology, though one assumes it is indeed a portmanteau of ‘derelict place’, and as for definition the same can be understood. Thus it implies somewhere which has been allowed to amass decrepitude, and so rules out much heavy duty British infrastructure which may suffer disuse, such as the great CEGB power stations, from falling within the remit of the term due to the rapidity of their demolition. The noun ‘derp’ is also almost exclusively used to describe what can be found on the surface world, and so tunnels – albeit many may be derelict in all their character – find themselves undefined by it as well. And derp is not only a noun; the level of decrepitude a derp displays can be described as derpy to a variable extent, one who goes for a look around a derpy derp can be seen to be derping, and if one makes a habit of it, could be considered a derper derping derpy derps.
Derps traditionally represent a UE subject matter which, relative to other avenues through which epic can be delivered to the urban explorer, carries with it a digestible connotation of trouble. One may be entitled to feel that as a derp’s presiding entity has indeed let it stray into a state of disrepair and does not appear to be taking measures to reverse such a trajectory; and that as the derp is a static, dysfunctional environment, tautologically disregarded, one’s presence as a trespasser can only be of limited relative sinisterness. Trouble within a standalone derp, not part of a wider site which carries a different set of Zonal connotations such as at Wilton, is customarily assumed to refrain from taking on a form which can really deconstruct he who finds himself in it. It is one part in light of this that they are inclusive and welcoming to all manner of UE hobbyist; that they often present some of the best value to his game, somewhere he can dictate his pace.
Take this and add to it the most crucial thing about derps to grasp: that they are today a widespread component of the very fabric of the Northern hemisphere. In Britain, they are everywhere. I would eat my hat if a discarded piece of man-made locality able to be objectively defined as a derp is any further than five miles away from any Briton at any time (cut that down to one or two for the English or Welshman). Yet it would appear many would struggle to locate their nearest. In the eyes of the general public, despite such widespread prevalence, they are wholly uncommon and irrelevant entities; neither catching the eye nor sparking a moment’s thought. Derps pass the general public by.
Precisely. And so it is the unassuming, local derp which is to be the traditional tinder for a future enthusiast of UE. There it might sit, in bushy greenbelt overgrowth or in the plain sight of a town centre in any which degree of dereliction and accessibility, and if an innocent, prospective urban explorer is destined to develop his future passion, he will feel a new sensation he has not before when he stops to look at it closely.
A derp is a finite phenomenon. It has a visible, physical life-cycle, in equal tune with chemistry as it is how humans choose to feel about it. All derps – a barn, civic institution, boat, factory, church, cinema, castle, railway, shopping mall, pump house, office, school, barracks, apartment, you name it, anything under the sun – used to be something; serve a purpose for people, perform functions as an asset. In this way derps inherently carry with them a drop of pathos, if not a bucket or several. For these were walls within which people played out linchpin chapters of their lives, which were emotionally woven in to their very existence. Confines which were known intimately, which embodied a vitality, meaning, significance. Suddenly, that’s all over. Time’s up.
Upon diagnosis of this superfluousness, derps find themselves abandoned. Arriving at a newly abandoned building can feel like a bank holiday, as if nobody has turned up for work and clientele has not arrived for service. An emptiness and stagnancy nonetheless penetrates immediately, the urban explorer stepping forth inside tuning into this air like a sixth sense. Soon, if not already, contents may begin to empty from the abandonment; any proportion of furniture, machines, old flotsam and jetsam is sold on, disposed of or moved elsewhere. The lights, if the structure(s) needed to have any, go out.
Months begin to pass, maybe years, before two pivotal events occur: a window pane breaks, and if the derp is not very well fortified, a group of people with – broadly speaking – antisocial inclinations subsequently finds itself inside. The fortification of the derp, by the way, is like everywhere in UE: at the discretion of the owner or presiding agent. As such a full spectrum is possible; metal-sheets covering every window, a wholesale import’s worth of wall-mounted sensors, a hired K9 unit and custom-installed palisades specifically for mitigating these kinds of visitors; to leaving the front door swinging in the wind. And everything in between. A derp’s securitisation will greatly influence the trajectory of its final chapter, and preoccupy the prospective trespasser to no end.
Let’s suppose the derp is a porous example. The broken window pane invites in chemistry by way of entropic decay, amongst the universe’s most silent yet relentless governing laws, the visible effect of which can scarcely be illustrated by a more apt subject than the derp. The natural disintegration of all physical properties of the derp begins applying itself. Day to day nothing changes, but when one looks back, everything is different. Some may call this an encroachment of beauty, of epic, but many taking an interest in the derp won’t take any notice. The derp is now in the crosshairs of a variety of people. One group of people who find themselves inside – copper thieves – strip the ceilings, floors and walls of scrap metal harbouring any value by night, whilst the other – bored young males – take a hammer to the derp’s remaining objects and douse its walls in spray paint by day. Pigeons establish a colony and creepers of ivy pushing inside spasmodically begin to intertwine themselves into the structure. The derp is now derelict.
Years of entropy continue to gnaw at it. Orifices to incoming water multiply like a moth eating a shirt, the vandal and the thief add to their mark, the last remaining traces of any objects beyond four walls disappear. Damp, mould and foliage tighten their grasp. The threshold whereupon beauty is no longer endowed by entropic process has arguably long passed – it now wreaks havoc, ugliness. Then one day, a decade or several after its abandonment, arrives a collapse. The camel’s back breaks; a roof or floor caves in, a youth messes around a bit too much and starts a fire that gets out of hand. The corpse is now little more than a skeleton, returned to the soil, and the derp assumes its final form before its only future beyond deformed endurance is total erasure at the hands of the bulldozer. It has become a ruin.
Of course, beyond the vandal and the thief, the derp will also host a recurring benign presence throughout its lifetime. A presence of cordial curiosity. In the beginning, the most powerful allure of the derp, of all UE has to offer, is novelty. A youngster in particular has in his formative years a limited scope to explore anything about the world around him. Trapped within the school gates for most of the day and with no means to venture beyond his immediate domestic vicinity in the fleeting evening leisure hours, life assumes a monotony. The discovery of a lowly derp amidst the carcass of post-industrial Britain, whatever it is; an old Nissen hut in the woods or an empty workshop next to the supermarket car park – it can change this. The novelty of this new place – where other people don’t go, where other people aren’t ‘supposed’ to go, where human influence has ceased, and where everything feels a bit different – has the ability to be extremely captivating to the youngster who happens to have the corresponding mental equipment. The feeling that arises in him upon immersing in his first derp will be a profound moment in his life. A derp can begin to fill the traditional role of the den, the treehouse or the nook as a space entrancing through its separation from everything else he has been taught to know, to take note of. A whole different world has just unfurled in the palm of the wide-eyed youngster’s hand.
Yet silently and slowly, a sad disenchantment is beginning. It may take a while hereafter, and it might take the assistance of 28Dayslater too, but eventually the youngster will realise that his derp is one of a handful within a bike ride away, and longer still that it is one of several dozen a short car journey yonder, and that each is a different shape, size, colour and texture, offering varying degrees of interest and epic. If he decides to dedicate even more time to researching his new intrigue on the internet, he will realise that there are thousands of derps around the country, each more entrancing than the next. It is at this point, whilst sentimentality and nostalgia ought to endure, that the interest he can find in his first derp may begin to wane, such as a child may exhaust the excitement of a little wooden figurine toy once informed that Santa may be bringing a big moving parts model of Tracey Island next Christmas. On the computer screen he vicariously encounters photographs of all manner of derp, bursting with different colours, textures and stories; huge, intricate, beautiful and compelling structures, powerfully seductive. He realises finally that providing they have not been demolished and still exist, it is within his capabilities to go out and visit all of them for himself, and if he’s lucky, find a hidden one of his own. The caterpillar has become a butterfly.
The disenchantment picks up pace. More seldom now does the glimpse of a loose palisade slat in a bush turn his head. The exoticism of shrouded otherness becomes watered down, the spectacle of disintegrating structure second nature, the romance of pathos for yesteryear up close and personal less and less poignant. As he graduates into intermediate experience, he finds himself suffering with a deficiency of the very vitamin with which the derp infatuated him in the first place: of novelty. It dawns that though there may be thousands of derps in Britain, the reality is that ninety-nine percent of them comprise comprehensively uninteresting subject matter when novelty is no longer able to bless a visitor. They come to offer no beauty, no historical significance, no gravitas, no intrigue; not a morsel of the epic he is now hooked on whatsoever. The more he derps the more forgettable the greater proportion of derps become, and the more he may find many becoming rightfully horrid places to find himself in as the layman asserted all along. The pitiful glimpse of grotty dereliction by the roadside which may once have spellbound the youngster passes him by once again.
But he is certainly not about to throw his stampbook in the bin. Note: ninety-nine percent. There is still a one percent of derps which offer the derper more than simply the notion of dereliction and obsolescence, which serve as by-and-large unwavering outposts of at least some demonstrable novelty and epic. Some might describe them as ‘good’. ‘Good’ derps are perhaps UE’s most integral commodity, and one of its most heavily traded. Now, heading through the 2020s, there are still around a hundred or two in Britain. ‘Good’ derps will find themselves well established as common knowledge to the keen derper. They will be catalogued, photographed from all angles, revered. Keen derpers will not easily forget them, nor will the scene ever fully exhaust its attention span with them until they cease to exist. Pious documentation before their potential demolition or total vandalism is treated by most 28Dayslater users’ school of thought, for example, as something of a duty. If a derp is judged to be ‘good’, is fairly easily accessible, and is not in one of the most isolated parts of the country, it will become staple fare. Hundreds will make the pilgrimage over the years. SP commented on the forum as early as 2008 about a default choreography of scene interest for derps of this tenor which has proven unchanged for years: “… the typical exploring cycle; discovery, exploration by the more ‘on the ball explorers’, loose lips and degrading to exploration by ‘every man and his dog’. Then pointless vandalism and much ado over who’s fault it is before rumours of security heightening and an inevitable period of unfashionableness because it’s supposedly ‘not doable’ anymore result from nobody trying to visit. Give it a few years and [if it’s still there and ends up on a social media post,] expect a renaissance.” This is bread and butter.
However, there is fine wine still to be served. There are therein a select number of derps that are truly special, where epic abounds around every corner, veritably above and beyond description as merely ‘good’. They may be regarded for our purposes as ‘outstanding’, and a derp regarded as ‘outstanding’ by the British scene becomes part of an exclusive club, brushing shoulders with the likes of Royal Ordnance Factory Bishopton, British Cellophane’s Bridgwater plant, Fletcher’s paper mill, Brunner Mond’s soda ash works, British Celanese’s Spondon plant, West Park hospital, Rover’s Longbridge plant, Tonedale dyeworks, Cwm coke works, Whitchurch hospital, and of course ICI’s Terylene plant at Wilton, to cherry pick an indicative roster. It must have a truly head-turning brochure to accrue such illustrious esteem. It must be multifacetedly out of this world; a portal to another era, extensive and stunningly beautiful, evocative to all disciplines of archaeologist and artist, brimming with unequivocal authenticity. It has to be simply breathtaking in every faculty, able to dispense spectacle, exoticism and romance in floods. The very greatest derps are fictitious, incredulous places.
It is this fictitious air, too, which epitomises a certain flavour of derp that the Pinterest-perusing armchair consumer of global UE media appears to seek, comprising the spoon-fed cliché of striking structural abandonment. Surprisingly or not, no British derps are nominated for such celebration. They are not Hollywood enough. Their tone is simply too grim, typified by the likes of the Terylene plant. Instead; it is subject matter in the vein of disintegrating chateaus in the European countryside, mass-evacuation ghost towns such as Fukushima and Chernobyl, and esoteric monuments of Eastern Bloc architectural schools which commercially drives the coffee table books in the art gallery gift shops. What you will find on our island, comparatively, is abrasively dour. Pick up 2017’s Abandoned: The Most Beautiful And Forgotten Places From Around The World, or Lost Interiors: Beauty In Desolation from the same year. How about 2016’s Abandoned Places: A Photographic Exploration Of More Than 100 Worlds We Have Left Behind, and while we’re at it, run it back to 2010’s Beauty In Decay, or for that matter 2012’s Beauty In Decay II. One of them is bound to be there in the gift shop, and most should only take a few minutes to get through – they’re just pictures. Make a tally of every time the same European, Asian or American location reappears and you’ll need an abacus, yet tally when a derp cherished by the British scene features and you will only need to employ the help of one hand, seldom even a finger. There is this unspoken consensus – particularly in the mind of the media-focused ‘big game hunter’ – that no truly fairy-tale abandonment, no worthy apple in the eye of the gallery-going beauty in decay-admirer is to be found here on this island. The way Britain built its gizmos and gubbins? Too brash, too harsh – lacking in the right kind of magic.
The concept of the outstanding, fantastical British derp in light of this finds itself betwixt and between. And more fatuous, more tenuous still it becomes when trying to get a discussion going on quantifying some sort of stature of location to the British urban explorer. “What exactly about them makes derp X strike you as okay, derp Y as substandard, and derp Z as marvellous? Why does hospital A’s corridor and ward – with colour scheme and furniture arranged thus – look better than hospital B, which has a little different a palette and collection of objects? Why is factory shop floor C, with this bit of kit and that bundle of knick knacks head turning, whilst factory shop floor D with that bit of kit and this bundle of knick knacks is middle of road?”, say. Valid questions, or a sham?
Subjectivity comes back to rule the roost. Whilst quick to grade a derp as worth their Saturday, worth their petrol, worth their exertion or not from a glance through the catalogue, asking most of Britain’s keenest derpers why, about what is important to them to render a derp praiseworthy or not, is to get blood from a stone. They fret at this kind of discourse; they make the visit to a derp because they want to, because there’s something about it either in a general overtone or a singular feature which fires their jets and that something is their concern, not anyone else’s – who gives a toss whether what’s good for the goose is or isn’t good for the gander?
I posed the question on justification of objective quality to the longstanding derping establishment anyway, and managed to amass a few helpful responses. The common themes in answers unsurprisingly revolve around the usual suspect motives of the urban explorer in any field of recreational trespass, with refined direction.
Around scale and aesthetics: “I always enjoy getting lost in a place, a place where you can spend hours inside; large sites, long spaces. Coming across one thing after another. It’s important to me to see the right colours and decay, rather than something that was vacated yesterday. I’m a sucker for photography too, I had to consciously stop the photography side of things taking over the exploring. I’m not bothered about what the access is. I don’t care if it’s been a nightmare getting in or I’ve just strolled through the front door. As long as the thing I’m seeing is lovely and interesting, that’s why I’m visiting.”
Around atmosphere and photogenic subject matter: “I like somewhere I can simply enjoy ‘being’, an escape from the outside world. The whole ‘untouched decay’ look, cliché as it sounds, really does it for me. Tranquility, where I can’t see or hear a soul, where the only sounds are the crunch under foot of detritus, birds singing outside, no man-made sounds but my own. But amidst all this, lacking a photogenic quality detracts from its calibre – I get frustrated when I can’t convey how it looks in the flesh through photographs. The accessibility needn’t matter in the slightest to me, the less of an ordeal the better.”
Around authenticity: “I find my interests funnel towards a few eras and design periods; specifically Cold War and eighties, but the scale of the design is more of a factor than a specific theme here. With that said, it again depends on the place’s purpose and function. It doesn’t need to be full of stuff to impress me, either. Yes, the idea of walking into a fully stocked building with stacks of equipment is amazing, but can overwhelm me. Less is often better. The experience and atmosphere will always trump photographs in my memory.”
Around immersion: “I’m a very visual person who is attracted to unusual textures and lighting, but it runs a bit deeper than that. The idea of somewhere that’s ‘off-limits’ is crucial too. If one of these places becomes an attraction you can visit on a public open day, my enthusiasm for it is reduced dramatically. In our modern lives pretty much nothing is unpredictable or dangerous, and because a derp is somewhere where such parameters apply to a much lesser degree, it becomes a distractor; an immerser, perhaps a de-stressor. So, I guess, it needs to be visually and psychologically appealing in those ways. I like the idea of collecting, too. I like visiting derps of a similar ilk for that reason.”
And around lore, especially that which is close to home: “Atmosphere, visual texture and history. I go into any derp with the aim to capture these three facets. There’s clearly a yearning and a myth-making essence to all this, and derps are implicitly interesting because they represent the echoes of a distant past and yet allow us to look forward and point to our own eventual demise. I’ll enjoy most derps that offer me this feeling, especially if they are local to me, as I place emphasis on a sense of ownership of where I live, knowing the ins and outs of what’s near me.”
Lastly, a thought about nostalgia, and its bespoke nature: “I’m evermore realising that what I’m trying to seek mostly these days, more than anything, is a nostalgia. I feel it’s the only special aspect of this hobby left, considering perception of nostalgia differs between each individual. I cannot pinpoint why anywhere satisfies this search more than another.”
Speed, objectively Britain’s greatest derper, offers a tongue in cheek jest: “swag, dear boy, what else!”
I‘d like to know what Clebby thinks. Clebby, my old flatmate, sits there in a Ralph Lauren shirt under a Barbour wax coat and rolls his eyes at me for bringing this kind of topic up. Clebby – immaculately spoken, lightning-quick witted and royally contemptuous about any analytics of UE sociology like this – is a paragon of the consummate derper and critic. He started doing this when he was very young, and has been partner to Speed on buckets of the most portentous ever discoveries in British UE since. Objectively, Clebby has extremely refined taste and knows exactly what he’s looking for. Though despite being able to pluck opinions from his sleeve on whether any derp ‘looks good’ or doesn’t based solely on the typeface used on the signs at the main gate, or something like this, he insists that he “just likes old stuff.” He has been almost everywhere I would personally consider outstanding in UK UE, and though I’m sure he didn’t make these visits on a whim, or because of a fad, he deflects offering any sweeping plaudits to any of them, nominating fine details as standout highlights in an air of indifference. He would not shy away from travelling to the other side of the country to visit a certain derp, for example, because he thought “the clock on the wall in the canteen looks cool.”
I pry. I ask him if he has any upcoming plans in a tourism capacity, if there’s anywhere currently in the spotlight that he would like to make a day out of, that ooze merit in his eyes. “The school near Loughborough that came up on the forum last year, maybe?” The school looks to me a lot like the one I had the displeasure of spending most of my teens within would if it had closed down a year ago. I can’t say I aspire to visit. “Why?” I ask. He pulls up pictures of it on the forum. “Look how dated that stairwell is. And the carpet in this room’s epic.”
I don’t know. Is then the concept of the fictitious, quixotic British derp, vis-à-vis that which the gallery gift shop photobook editor seeks, a myth? Is justification of quality of derp even a topic that can be dwelled upon in any seriousness? Maybe. Maybe not. Though let’s leave it at this: one cannot fully endorse a conclusion that a real majesty of derelict place is all baloney, refute the concept entirely, without first looking a handful of case studies in the eye and waving a hand of dismissal. For example, what a ‘perfect’ derp might look like, might feel like – through my rose-tinted spectacles at least – is just like Spadeadam.
Study One: The Aerodrome
Picture it: this Saturday we’re going camping. The mood is jovial, despite checking the latest weather radar reading to see an outlying tenacious patch of torrential rain heading due north towards us straight over the Pennines. Nevertheless, it is due to pass over before nightfall. July is my favourite time of year – I am a whinger in the face of the usual wet, cold, grey, dark, windy and thoroughly miserable winters which Britain is beset with – but it was a winter’s day of perfect conditions on which I was first smitten with our outing’s intended destination several Februaries ago under a clear blue sky and a light dusting of snow.
Soon, it’s time for our car-full of five – usual suspects – to turn off the A69 near Haltwhistle, Northumberland – the ‘centre of Britain’ geographically so it claims – and begin to take several miles of logging track away from civilisation. The scenery is warm on the soul. What you could call close to wilderness – void of hedges, dry stone walls or ownership by landed gentry whilst falling outside the remit of being called a National Park and thus busy with footfall – is particularly hard to come by in England and Wales (perhaps not so hard in Scotland), but this is certainly England’s best example of such a setting. Only a few farmsteads endure here, their highland cattle free to roam the boggy heaths unpenned. We soon encounter a small herd of them lying across the middle of the track. One individual is scratching its neck on a Ministry of Defence sign warning wayfarers of live ordnance and low flying aircraft.
This is not a typical UE preamble, because it’s not a typical destination. In 1950, celebrated children’s author C.S. Lewis published his most famous novel about a portal to an enchanted woodland world in the back of a wardrobe. Around the same time, ground was being broken in a remote region of peat bog and fresh coniferous forest plantation in Cumbria, close to the Northumberland border, for a cutting edge new Royal Air Force base named Spadeadam. It was to be the largest in the country by acreage, focused on testing intermediate range ordnance. Today, Spadeadam serves as an electronic warfare tactics and bomber aircraft training range. Our destination pertains to the latter function. And whilst not every urban explorer can claim to have even a residual interest in what this destination offers nor see any appeal in large expansive areas of pine, fir and spruce trees as a backdrop, once he has disappeared into the dense forest, weaved through its verdant branches and crossed its babbling brooks before, just as in the fantasy of C.S. Lewis, he emerges into what feels like a world of imagination, I say he would be a cynic Sartre would call a match if he manages to withhold a brief boyish smile.
Eventually the cattle decide to get up and move off the road. A short while further along, the heath either side of the track is enveloped by the young Kielder forest, England’s largest. Despite its plantation origins, enchantment is not found wanting. A bit beyond the last farm just before we are to leave the car and set off on foot, we cross a river through a little ford. At this time of the evening, in an environment such as this, at this time of year, it can mean only one phenomenon is to be our welcome party as we get out of the car. Fishbrain and Spyro are well prepared, having camped in high summer in the Scottish Highlands not too long ago, and produce beekeeper hats with face nets out of their rucksacks, whilst Tweek, T4rkovsky and I can only tuck our trousers into our socks. Within a few minutes, though, the swarm of midges is no longer our problem: a thunderclap signals the arrival of the northward-bound rain cloud and a torrential deluge begins to hammer down. We retreat back into the car. Twenty minutes later, things are in our favour; the midges have dissipated, the rain subsides, and we collect our gear before hopping back over the river we have just forded and disappearing into the forest-come-wardrobe to make camp with the last of the evening light.
We sleep well. A cloudburst of similar proportions does not disturb our night, and our well-constructed tarpaulin canopy over the hammocks does not get called into serious action. Moss is all around; on the forest floor and on branches, sparkling in dew. Butterflies dance around. But for the midges, it would be a postcard from Eden. We make some tea and pack up before continuing onwards through the forest. The terrain is boggy, but not sodden; pillowy, perhaps. Funny where ‘urban’ exploring can lead you.
Soon, there is light at the end of the treeline, along with a glimpse of something silver and out of place. The back of the wardrobe swings open, and the big reveal discloses a dozen rusting Cold War fighter jets lying in a clearing. After initially being charmed, what might strike a visitor next is what to make of the finer details of the so-called clearing. It looks like a runway, an airfield. Sort of. But there is no asphalt or tarmac to be found. From satellite imagery the blueprint of what certainly looks like a bona fide aerodrome is a conclusion of certainty, yet upon arrival at ground level there is only bog, grass tufts and mud comprising the terrain. A juvenile spruce tree has begun to sprout next to the twisted, lichen-covered tyre of the first plane’s front wheel. Analysis is only further confused. How and why are they here?
There would be no reason to arrange these old jets in the middle of the forest so daintily, symmetrically, and leave them to rust without intending to use them as target practice for bombing run exercises, but no evidence of any ordnance is to be found; no craters in the ground, no shrapnel. They cannot have been flown in and landed right here – no runway of any half-serious Air Force outfit in the world for anything but a bush pilot’s work could reach such a condition of quagmire and wilding since 1989.
I quote 1989 due to the line-up of aircraft found here. The sleek silver specimens a visitor will first encounter in a perfect coupling are actually French machines: Dassault Mystères from 1953. Further up the ‘runway’ we find several more of these alongside clusters of American Lockheed Shooting Stars from the late forties. The black sheep of the flock is the largest and most alluring: a Soviet-built Sukhoi Su-17 fighter-bomber from the late seventies. There is no way this aircraft could have ended up in a forest clearing in Cumbria before the fall of the Berlin wall, hence the dating estimate for the planes’ arrivals. Upon inspection of cockpit dials, the Sukhoi was East German, which makes sense.
Drizzle begins whilst we go about our frolicking, so we take shelter inside the engine bay of the Sukhoi. The single engine has since been removed, but the space where it was housed – almost the entire long body of the aircraft – is more comfortable for a small group than one might think. The exhaust – rim splattered with oil staining like a kaleidoscope – faces a horizon on which the main structures of the Spadeadam base are visible far in the distance. Its radar antenna spins round and round, anti-air missile turrets either side of it. We are a couple of miles away as the crow flies, in a little corner of nowhere. We’d prefer to keep it that way. More than happy here, trouble can wait. Perhaps one day a resolved trespasser will take it upon themselves to push further into the base unauthorised across much of the same terrain as we have to investigate ramshackle huts, the launch pads where the Blue Streak ballistic missile testing in the fifties took place and who knows what else, but the aerodrome is too cosy for any of this right now as the rain pitter-patters on the Soviet jet’s metalwork.
In the snow years ago, my companions and I were awoken from the aerodrome’s trance by the very low flying aircraft the sign miles back at the farmstead had informed us about. This was followed by the booming sound of a small explosion beyond our line of sight, albeit close enough to us as to feel the ground rumble a little. Where do they drop them on their runs? Where if not here? Why not? Why does this exist? The aerodrome of dreams is inexplicably spared molestation by the organisation that must have birthed it.
The Spadeadam pleasure is a simple one, and one with which the natural element and setting gets uniquely involved. An old plane is nowhere near the most memorable object that the accomplished urban explorer will encounter in his time. There will too be a scrapyard, several scrapyards, for Warsaw Pact and NATO mid-century fighter jets somewhere else in Europe, Russia and America. But there isn’t one where they’re draped over a remote clearing in imitation taiga forest brushing tenderly against blooming foxglove.
Studies Two & Three: The Icons
A ‘perfect derp’ for Britain? All roads in such a discussion with those acquainted with the subject will always lead back to the same place. People will never stop talking about that place. About Pyestock. Those that built it, carried out their work beyond its gate houses – the one to the north behind the marshland reserve or the one to the south just across the road from Farnborough airport – I think they’re sadly no longer with us, but one does wonder how much they talked about it into their autumn years too. “If you are a mechanical or aeronautical engineer, applied mathematician, physicist, materials scientist, or chemist interested in combustion, you may be the type of person we are seeking”, says a 1975 recruitment leaflet issued by the Procurement Executive, Ministry of Defence. Bright minds were sought for Pyestock; a mixed bag of eminence for a multifarious place. Scientific research institute was an appropriate description. Sprawling industrial creature would have been also. Institutional testament to British post-war technological prowess befitted to boot.
It was 1926 when an engineer called Alan Griffith first suggested that a gas turbine could propel an aircraft, among other vehicles, to frontiers new of locomotion. It would be another thirteen before Frank Whittle’s creation would realise this, and a further nine before Her Majesty’s government decided that the jet engine was the real deal, the next big thing. Cue in as good an anachronistic Keynesian fashion as any the birth of a half mile-by-half mile facility, jumbled and modular, on a grassy patch of flat land in Hampshire. The Ministry of Supply christened operational license by the title: National Gas Turbine Establishment.
For the next four decades, Pyestock is home to the British state’s arm all things jet engine and its research, steadily expanding one contraption, one doodah at a time. As the facility becomes more elaborate, the art it deals in gets finer; engines quieter, more efficient, more powerful, of greater stamina. Its annual fruits, such as Concorde’s Olympus engines first run on site in 1966, are carted just across the road to the Farnborough air show for the world to marvel. This is absolute peak Britain, in full bloom before the rot set in.
But political setups change; the state’s hand in all this stuff begins to retract and private players gather around the site, bewildered by the fantastical array of all its shapes and sizes, unsure what exactly to do with it. Eventually they give up – don’t want to play with it any more. Computer simulations on turbine blade angling for lesser compound emissions at Rolls Royce Derby, for instance: that’s what’s up. National Gas Turbine Establishment Pyestock shuts. The gates close, the last shift cuts its last cake, closes out the last bar tab, and the curtains rise for the second half act of its legacy, lasting nearly fifteen years.
There was really not an inch of the site that the urban explorer would refrain from considering anything short of a delight. A resort – five stars. Many a young man and young lady who had reached the point of taking their first trip in the car beyond the realm of their local derp found themselves in the woods tackling their first customary chainlink-barb fence, pockmarked and patchworked, before surfing an undulating manifold of giant bright blue pipes and exhausts, overgrown with grass, around the site as if a slide in some kind of water park, building after building unfurling before them each with a more towering, more idiosyncratic sculpture of specialist functionality inside. Time between the rising and the setting of the sun scarcely afforded sufficient enough a session.
Three objects above all warranted the highest praise, comprised the most gluttonous feasts of epic even as standalone, to say nothing of sitting all inside the same fence. One, the air house: a turbine hall without thermal input to produce supersonic air. Eight gas turbines of full size in a red and white paint job, stumpy half-cylinders like giant loo rolls, complete with designated control room. Two, Cell Four: something the likes of which will never be seen again. An enormous coat of arms to be donned by subject jet engines in order to test their performance and atmospheric behaviours at full thrust. A spectacular organism; a giant freak with no likeness the globe over. Three, the anechoic chamber: and things keep getting sillier. The world’s largest; a cube the size of a concert hall, a veritable Farnborough Square Garden, every inch overlaid with thousands of jutting triangular sound-dampening modules in basketweave on all six sides with the east wall dominated by a huge exhaust chasm. I omit celebration of the site’s power plant, endless mint-green control rooms, workshops, and Cells one through three for a simple lack of time and space on the page. The full literature one needs is online: it’s Simon Cornwell’s or Speed’s, perhaps for print one day. These are but singular reasons why people will never stop talking about Pyestock.
Discounting Inverkip, in the late noughties, the only other derp which could play queen to the kingly excitement and joy with which Pyestock spoilt the giddy young scene was Cane Hill. Consider the question – put both to the informed enthusiast of the derp or to someone for whom the notion of the derp has crossed their thoughts for the very first time: what is the first thing that springs to mind as associated with the abandoned, the derelict? Collecting statistics is not necessary to be sure that the most common answer, by far, will be: a hospital. Specifically: a mental hospital. An ‘asylum’. The abandoned, all-brick, Gothic psychiatric facility of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on a grey day has forever been the standard-bearing cliché of the derp in global cultural norms. It always will be. That’s how it is – they’ve got that something, that seductive macabre.
And not least on the British Isles. The ‘pauper lunatic asylums’ – remnants of which be they in ruins or redevelopments can be found in every county – have firmed place for themselves in British folklore. In his 1961 Water Towers speech calling for strategic change in psychiatry and an ultimate move away from institutional facilities, Enoch Powell spoke of them standing “isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside – the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day.” The unpleasant histories and old wives’ tales surrounding psychiatric medical practices, their shifts away from an institutional setting, as well as the whole lore surrounding the over one-hundred of Britain’s subsequently defunct Victorian and Edwardian asylums and their starring cultural role in UE are widely written on elsewhere already in a formal capacity. But what of Cane Hill in particular?
That’s an easy one. For of all the scores of asylums which collectively dominated a definable era of early British UE, there was never any debate, any contest as to the most august. One hundred yays, decidedly zero nays on this question. It is largely pointless to go into the details of why. Yes – it had by far the most objects left behind. Made beds, dusty linen and all, drawers of art therapy pieces, whatever you can think of. Yes – its design was standout, a ‘radial pavilion’ in layout like a paper fan. Yes – the entropic decay was of a level right up to demolition which brought everything the derper sought to a sumptuous fore. More than that. Sat on a shrouded, gently raised plot at the due-southern edge of the suburban reach of London, Cane Hill illustrated with vivid veracity to every nascent urban explorer whose innate cliché of the derp was beginning to entrance them the first truly Arcadian manifestation of their imaginations. Simon Cornwell in his seminal blog CultofCaneHill reminisces:
“We walked down a wide, muddy bridleway, screened by high bushes and overgrown grasses on either side. We turned the corner and there it was. A ward of the derelict asylum loomed menacingly over us. This bleak and mesmerising three storey structure didn’t just simply tower, it just simply didn’t loom, it had a definite physical presence and no pictures on any websites could prepare us for our first physical encounter with Cane Hill. Some of the windows were broken and shredded strips of curtains flapped in the breeze. We could see some bed lamps, tables and bedsteads through the arched windows. We stared and the building stared back. It was the summer of 1999. Little did we know the effect Cane Hill would have on both of our lives for the next ten years.” Both Cane Hill and Pyestock were thin air by 2011 and 2014 respectively.
Study Four: The Foundry
The infinite online catalogue of UE photographs would have the browser believe that the world is awash with rotting heavy industry. Herculean indoor spaces the height of an office block, length of a cruise liner, crumbling; shedding metal, forming mould. Precipitators, once the lungs of fierce process, swaying in the wind like chimes; turbine casing paintwork peeling off in flurries. The photographs hit the screens of the British explorer’s phone, laptop, and he knows full well where they have come from: not on his island. The scenes described are from the continent; across the Channel or Atlantic, perhaps in the former Soviet Union too. They are in the Rust Belt, the Rhine-Ruhr and Siberia.
The British predetermined fate for industry of the largest scale – steel, oil, chemicals, power – need not be gone over again in detail. After the special happenstance of Pyestock, nothing like the classical beauty of the long-derelict steelworks of Charleroi, chemical works of Ufa or power plants of Pennsylvania was bequeathed to Britain. As the Belgian steelworks or power plant, for example, is left to gather ruin and foliage in a state of meagre securitisation, for the British derper to be able to immerse himself in the epic of what can happen to unkempt heavy industry as decades go by, he tends to concede that he must take a holiday, and promptly finds himself on the road heading for Dover – for the consensus was that there was nothing to be found here which could swerve the bulldozer for the necessary years of maturation. Or was there something?
After several hours forging an improvised desire path through densely wooded swampland and brambles; skirting ponds, bridging gulleys, negotiating rogue palisades and wrestling bushes before trudging shin-deep saline sludge on the banks of the Usk estuary, Spyro and Boba find themselves at the secluded southern end of a steel rolling mill site in South Wales. Boba! Sagacious, and always a pleasure to find as company. Another key member of our circle, BL is seasoned; he has been involved with the faster moving lanes of a variety of UE niches since before the likes of myself stumbled upon the lowly swimming pool or Spyro began revising for his GCSEs, and though he understates it, he is a font of erudition – he is able to perpetually pull out from his sleeve esoteric knowledge about all sorts on the spot; science, crafts, history, arts. After effective retirement from any fieldwork like this, a bit of persuasion from Spyro has brought him out briefly, to this point, far into the bush. Here, he points at the structure behind the reeds, and knows what he’s looking at. Rightfully, he is excited.
The steel rolling mill site Spyro and Boba stand before is not just any, and nor still is the particular corner from which they face it. Whilst at the opposite end of the site one may find process, hissing steam and men at work, here on the other side of the journey’s last bushes awaits a surprising jungle of sprouting pipes, rogue ladles, a few trucks with flat tyres and other metallic detritus. Precipitators sway in the wind like chimes, tolling as it starts to get more blustery. A large piece of metal chafes and falls some height from the wall. Due to the situation of the site and its southern side facing the estuary shrouded by bushes, it is impossible to examine the state of all this from a road, a gate, a footpath, et cetera. It comes as revelatory. Just what exactly is all this then?
Squeezing through a loose metal sheet, inside the structure, Spyro and Boba find that more of the roof is on the floor than in place. A thousand pieces of metal and wood cover the mossy ground like chain mail. Two massive crucibles, stooped a little at an angle like a pair of cherries on a vine, sit at the base of a concrete mezzanine level a couple of storeys high. A rusted stairwell beckons the visitors up. Atop it – positioned as to almost slap them in the face as they reach the last flight – is a girder with “take your time” scribbled on it in large painted letters. An electric arc furnace – a device as big as a bus which uses copious amounts of electricity and gas discharge to create superheated conditions – gathers mould, whilst next to it lies a contraption novel to Spyro and Boba: some kind of motorised, wheeled stoking lance for the furnace. It is moping, inert since the keys were pulled from its ignition at the moment, long ago, when the workforce was informed it was suddenly out of a job. Inside the dark of the materials store next to the arc furnace hides a kitchenette, a few mugs on its worktop each with a spoon in ready to stir the next cup of tea never poured. Under the arc furnace at ground level is a solidified mass of once-molten product, left without a care for safe procedure to ooze out of the ladle unwatched. Every scene is a frozen still from an aloof upping of sticks.
Spyro and Boba find that one of the most salient characteristics of the melt shop is that it has become a fertile habitat. From the gantry crane sprouts fern and ivy, winding down in suspension like an ancient hanging garden. Two toads sit in a puddle on the floor. Below the crane, an apparatus for holding crucibles full of molten product in place has maintained its crimson colour all this time, and on its flat top, a lushness of ferns surrounds a solitary skip, inexplicably placed. Besides the skip, from above, it could be a miniature mock-up of a tropical island diorama.
A clunk of something heavy and a hiss in the distance reverberates into the melt shop. Of course, it’s the rolling mill at work behind the flimsy partition over there. The visitors can be forgiven for forgetting. The operation here is owned by Liberty Steel – Britain’s largest albeit notoriously financially plagued secondary steelmaking company – though the site was originally commissioned by a now-defunct company called Alphasteel in the mid-seventies. The mid-seventies? Rough dating this degree of entropic decline by sight, Spyro and Boba can see a good thirty year or more or dereliction in play here. It must have only lived a little over a decade of working life before the decision was made to cut back operations to rolling only. One can imagine that the mood amongst the workforce upon the redundancy announcement may go some way to explain how things have been left as they are. The demolition sector finally noticed the foundry was there in 2024.
Study Five: The Mill
I don’t think any art historian has taken a deep dive into the motivation behind why L.S. Lowry painted the subject matter that he did. It was simply because that was what was there. You are hard pressed to find an esteemed classical painting of a Northern English scene without the background overflowing with mill chimneys. Because they were there, everywhere. The Victorian textile mills of the North are fabled in early modern British history, yet now stand as intangible echoes. Their exteriors still swarm the outskirts of Manchester, Blackburn, Bradford, but inside: converted flats, offices, personal storage, unrelated small businesses, or ruin. Black and white sketches of children cowering before a grumpy, portly owner are a token feature of primary school history textbooks. “This is what would have happened to yous if yous were born a hundred years earlier!”, says the teacher. The children in today’s classroom have every right to shrug shoulders. It is a far cry from their world; a time which has disappeared from the hills and valleys of the North never to be seen again. Unless?
When the mind conjures a ‘dark and satanic’ image of a mill to marry to William Blake’s, it will certainly resemble in phenotype one to be found neatly sat at the bottom a valley somewhere in West Yorkshire. She is the Victorian textile industry’s Snow White, in deep sleep within a locked casket no mere mortal may pry; an encompassing hulk of stone, glass and ghostliness, murders of crows and tubular metal walkways criss-crossing her high reaches. Built only a few years after Queen Victoria was born, in its austere mass the mill is the only presence bold enough to speak through the whitewash fog which regularly sweeps over from the moors to engulf this landlocked outpost of old-world England where it lies.
[Further context redacted]
Inside the mill is reverie. Tweek captures the essence: “Her walls talk with brash Yorkshire honesty, all the while doing something hauntologically unparalleled to the senses. Trapped in the grasp of memories that aren’t one’s own, scrawled anecdotal in-jokes on sliding doors are now cast in stasis and unattainable. There are boats in the attic, next door from looms of every process. Steel walkways link room after room of creaking floorboards. In a garage, there is a 1920s Bentley. There is an 1880s horse drawn carriage in a miscellaneous ground floor shed. There are work floors of roving spinners, next door from stacked cardboard boxes of wool bunting marked: ‘For Special Envoy: Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, 1953’. There are offices full of order logs going back to the reign of Edward VII and a laboratory with a pair of penny farthings resting against the wall; there are cigar-stained walls in a private apartment adjoined to the sample room and yarn store – its hundreds of towering shelves brimming with spindles of all colours – in which a tea set from a Beatrix Potter tale sits in a small kitchenette. A solitary poster of a cat slowly loses its grip on the wall. The grocery shopping log is last stamped in company approval: 1965.”
There is something in the air; something in the cobwebs on the walls, the damp creeping in through the ceiling, and the amplified sound of the trespasser’s footsteps against the utterly silent acoustic backdrop that tells him, sternly, that he is now a guest in no ordinary old building. This is something else, something eldritch. He is somewhere in which time has not exactly stood still, but has fractured into a confused array in which every nook and every cranny is imbued with the very purest, 24 Karat essence of any which decade between some time from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Everything about the spectacles and artefacts within the thick stone walls is cosy, congenial, demure, yet they may well sing a Siren’s Song. The next move could force retreat; an unforeseeable sensor in a stairwell, a faceless associate of its owners arriving to collect a piece of random tat for some unknown purpose. A decade of trespass experience inside the mill does little to calm the recurring visitor, to muster a confidence of being in complete control of his second-nature route through the maze. For all her sincerity from the outside and for all her stature over the village, the mill is a delicate flower; one must always place utmost importance on the careful tread, on one’s presence inside being akin to that of a ghost, if one hopes to be reunited with her treasures again.
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