The Zone is a very complex system of traps.. I don’t know what it’s like when there is no one here, but as soon as humans appear, everything begins to move. Former traps disappear, new ones appear. Safe places become impassable, and the way flitters between easy and confusing beyond words. You might think it’s capricious but at each moment The Zone is just what we’ve made it by our state of mind. Some people have had to turn back empty-handed after going half-way. Some perished at the threshold of The Room. Whatever happens here, depends not on the Zone, but on us… Tell me, Professor, why did you get involved in this business? What’s the Zone to you? …Well, no one has a conception about the Zone, so it will be a sensation.
The cinephile will remember the monologue. It comes from the 1979 film Stalker, brainchild of renowned Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky. The inspiration of the tale in turn comes from a novel called Roadside Picnic, published in 1972 by celebrated science fiction authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Interviews with and comments by Arkady and Boris on the genesis of their creative work – the general premise of which was something of delightful originality within the genre from both the East and West – are fabled, penned examples likely locked deep in a vault under a Moscow library if they do exist. Although esteemed across the Soviet Union and by no means black-marked as political radicals at the time, the novel still had a bumpy ride getting through the Communist Party censorship wringers. Quite why is unclear, as in terms of alluding to any political themes the novel is pretty vague, with most readers (and viewers of the subsequent Tarkovsky film) citing more of a religious allegory in the narrative than anything else.
In fact personally emotional, religious, spiritual, and any tenuous political allegories to both Roadside Picnic and Stalker comprise the sum of review, analysis and discussion about them by those who hold themselves as students or experts of literature and film. Objectively, Roadside Picnic marks is the first elaborate and culturally prominent illustration of the concept of defiantly navigating “a quarantined, alien, ever-changing, ruinous and consequential Zone” – a geographical area with a border in simplest terms – “to seek a reward of something mysterious, intangible, yet possibly providential.” For more or less the total sum of their academic assessment surfacing in review, they are handled as purely fictional and fantastical stories.
Roadside Picnic and Stalker’s notability comes in bulk from the fact that their principal character is not a person, rather a place. A fenced place; guarded, fortified, on paper impregnable and in theory deadly; hazardous, able to pro-actively punish those that step foot in it, and trespassed across by only a few people with a removed assessment of dare, allure and clandestine insight into how it works which others might overlook: the Zone. In great detail, the three artists craft a vivid realisation of this concept; of the Zone as something with a mythical, supernatural power to affect emotion, judgement and action, only able to be experienced once the threshold into it has been crossed. They show us at length in their works that within the Zone every movement is consequential to an abstruse degree and that some sort of psychological bond or protocol must be established with it as a living entity in order to navigate through it safely towards an end destination of a rumoured artefact of unprecedented aura.
Regardless of what one might think this journey is symbolic of, the works’ almost entire word count and run time encompasses time negotiating with and reflecting upon the significance of the Zone. All but every commentator on Roadside Picnic or Stalker uses this journey as a fictional means to a symbolic end, an end with more of a foothold in popular lore; reaching heaven, enlightenment, accepting glory or defeat, or defiance of something brimming with meaning.
Very well, but to put it bluntly, they have not met my friends. It has happened in privacy, but there’s no reason to shy away from a hypothesis that the practice of this concept of navigating the Zone has, since Stalker, at the reins of a small number of curious individuals quite literally transcended from the realms of science-fiction to reality. I have seen a kind of similar obsession with the idea of the Zone as captured by the Russian storytellers diffuse from screen and paper to the night.
Such ‘real’ Zones exist in parameters of characteristics true to Tarkovsky’s and Strugatskys’ realisations; cordoned off from and fortified against society within which existing some kind of material terrain, patrolled and monitored, with a proactive and selective ability to punish those that choose to enter it. At their hearts lie spectacles which are in their design for those rogues who commit to enter the Zone to try to catch a glimpse of them reputed to astonish and evoke a broad range of unequivocal emotion and high no such substance existing outside of the Zone can replicate.
As on the screen or page, in order to reach the interior of the Zone from before its threshold, a special practice and resolve is to be demanded by the terrain ahead. Burdens carried with entering the Zone are much like those in Soviet science fiction; the journey will be testing of character, possibly scarring, socially condemned, physically demanding, and above all highly unpredictable. Challenges of Zone navigation are never completely systematic or robotic. Whilst planning is essential, in some cases it only can see so far: the amount of variables in every step, the manifold of consequential timelines which can arise from every decision to proceed in whatever direction at whenever the precise moment impacts the brain in some kind of way I would suppose able to be better described by a chess grandmaster than myself.
For Tarkovsky, “the Zone wants to be respected. Otherwise it will punish.” For him in the night experiencing the Zone, such a remark is just as fervent. A navigator who finds himself on the wrong side of the fence is defined by a will do absolutely everything possible to act with respect for the Zone: to not be detected by it. On the wrong side of the fence, every step, breath, glance; it is towards a cause of remaining invisible, with progressing the navigation towards its interior – whilst the overarching goal – as auxiliary, secondary, completely disposable. “The Zone is a complex system of traps”, and there are two categories to get to know: traps are animate, or they are inanimate.
Inanimate traps are more of a controllable quantity for navigators than their counterparts. Inanimate traps are physical obstacles which halt a navigator’s progress, often from the right side of the fence; unscalable fences, significant bodies of water, precarious ladders, dense razor wire, locked doors, terrain sludgy in texture enough to have the effect of quicksand, claustrophobic and intensely hot crawl spaces that lead to nowhere, holes in the floor. They are traps which have the power to be fatal if excessively reckless and clumsy. Indeed; too much rust on a ladder, a slip off a fence top onto razor wire, a sudden rush of water into a culvert: it’s no joke. In the dark, in the Zone, on this separate fabric, everything must be treated with delicacy.
Meeting with inanimate traps as unavoidable parts of the navigation frequently causes those on the wrong side of the fence to turn back, to return another night with a fresh set of tactics, equipment, ideas. For it is so that in three dimensions, in this wide game, sandbox environment; these inanimate traps become non-negotiable terrain that the Zone can conjure en-route to its interior – in light of where it chooses to be and what it is able to see – because a simpler route to avoid an inanimate trap can lead a navigator into view of an animate trap. This blockades the obligation to not disturb equilibrium, to remain invisible, to never be there but through one’s own eyes alone.
A chess board: consider inanimate traps as pawns, and animate traps as the back row of high value pieces which must be taken in order to check the king. They are in simplest terms anything that can evoke a change of behaviour from the Zone. Those capable of sending the Zone into a frenzy by setting off a chain reaction to alert it to one’s presence; to cause the Zone to stir into life, to react, to make the navigator on the wrong side of the fence the centre of attention he so desperately endeavours to never be. Cameras, sensors, rumblers at the fence – of course. And more once inside the Zone: more cameras, more sensors; trip-activated sensors, floodlighting, alarmed doors; workers, contractors, guards, canines. They create the framework of the Zone.
A split-second glimpse of a navigator’s presence by one of the dozens of conscious animate traps littering the Zone makes any progression deeper into it thus of sudden irrelevance. The navigation as it was conceived of is now on a precipice, and two choices of action remain; retreat and escape, or hide and observe. Once the Zone learns about a navigator’s presence, the experience is suddenly abrasively different from what it was intended to be. Too many loose ends, wrong steps, wrong timings, insufficient attention to detail left with each movement, each moment, can solicit the Zone into stripping the navigator naked like this. Mapping the view, clarity, response behaviours and speeds of animate traps is the most rudimentary form of interaction with the Zone.
In the Zone, navigators quickly come to terms with the fact that all its traps are there just for them. They always were. The fence, above all, punctuates this. A sophisticated and effective perimeter fence for the Zone comes at a price tag well into seven figures Sterling, with implementation and maintenance costs of sensors, cameras and roving personnel adding as good as doubling the sum on top of that. All this investment is endowed to the Zone for the sole purpose of keeping unwelcome visitors out of it. For us. The dignified navigator must therefore conduct himself with utmost respect for the Zone. This is not optional. The right side of the fence becomes the venue of a decisive act.
The point of it all; the point, indeed, of the Strugatskys’ and Takorvsky’s stalkers? It’s The Room. A film student writes analytically about Stalker: “The Zone is the location of an alien visitation where there is to be found mystical artefacts, the most important of which is The Room, a place that grants the deepest wish of whoever enters it. This is the end destination and ultimate goal of those that dare to enter the Zone. The problem, of course, is that no one really knows what their deepest wish is, nor has anybody ever seen the results of The Room’s power. It is stalker’s and other’s faith in The Room, not its actual power, that’s important”. The Room is intended to be a boutique destination. This is the end of the line in the Zone: there is no further entity to travel to which would not feel like retracing steps hereinafter, such is the terrific detail of the The Room. It is the point at which the navigator holds the Zone as a snowglobe in his palms. To be here is to be as immersed in the complex system of traps as possible, to be beholden to its evocation most incandescently.
And so where is the Zone? Where is it that the parameters of the fictional setting to come to life; where he who treads forth is compelled to behave so warily like the stalker and fixate on the same kind of traps, consequences and motivations; where an alternate plane of existence beyond the fence clicks into effect and acts upon him with each step? Classically, the world’s urban explorers associate the term Zone with one place: Chernobyl. A Zone excluded by definition and nomenclature, of course, and one of an epitomising aesthetic; a vast open world dominated by forest and swampland terrain, strewn with man-made ruination, within which there can appear various kinds of traps, contextualised around an event touching as close to Soviet science fiction as reality gets. Such close inspiration has been drawn from Tarkovsky in the way the flourishing Ukrainian UE scene has taken to trespassing through Chernobyl that the verb ‘stalking’ has found a permanent home in their lexicon when talking about it.
But on this green and pleasant land of ours there is no such wide terrain like this. Instead, a different interpretation of the Zone is presented. Imagine, please, the idea of a site, a square kilometre or two in area; isolated, introverted, highly fortified, patrolled. Sentient fences rising high, complex systems of inanimate and animate traps at every turn, near and far. Large open spaces and close quarters structural environments in equal measures. Somewhere within which everything begins to move as soon as humans appear before the fence; former traps disappear, new ones appear, safe places become impassable, and the way flitters between easy and confusing beyond words. Somewhere made by a state of mind: a sensation. Veritably such sites just as described are here on our island in a distinct manifestation: they are those of energy-related infrastructure. Night falls and those drawn to the Zone assemble in the fields, bewitched by its red glow.
A large industrial site concerned with the production, synthesis, storage and modification of energy somewhere in the United Kingdom is de-synced from the electrical grid for the final time on Monday, and decommissioning begins. Around its perimeter is a ten foot high fence topped with razor wire, along with a thin cable running throughout it: a rumbler. It has three-hundred-and-sixty-degree infra-red sensors about every fifty yards. On the wrong side of the fence, a van with two security personnel armed with searchlights patrols the fence line, completing a lap about once every twenty minutes. They are expecting unwelcome visitors.
Many months, possibly years ago, two navigators appeared on the wrong side of the fence, and as if they were spectres, moved a significant distance towards the heart of the site and back again unseen. After several nights spent watching the Zone from the right side of the fence with militant attention to detail, they donned frogman waders, packed dry-bags, and headed to an unlit patch of remote grass upon the Zone’s threshold. Under a certain spot on the fence line, nestled in foliage, a body of water enters a drain that continues under the fence and into the site. The drain’s mouth is covered by a cage. The navigators trudge through the stream, starting a way’s away from the fence to reach the cage. Carrying knowledge they have learned from examining similar objects on drain infrastructure in their home towns, they turn a particular rivet on the side of it with a two pence coin, and the top of the grill eases open. They wade through the stream deeper into the Zone under cover of darkness, scanning the peripheral view from above the banks of the stream for any visually animate objects amidst growing ambient floodlighting.
Before long, they are in the vicinity of a cooling tower. Nearby, just across an access road for vehicular site traffic, there is a ladder leading upwards to a gantry walkway, which then in turn disappears into a denser network of pipes. They lay prone in the shadowed vegetation of the brookside no man’s land waiting for a vehicle to pass along the access road. The pipeline network moves towards one of the larger buildings of the site within which, the architecture of it would lead the satellite viewer to infer, lies an artefact of interest. The navigators brush up to the edge of the building, which houses the means for a variety of chemical processes. They encounter an ajar fire exit to one of its upper floors. The navigators tread lightly through the organs of the building to reach a vantage point where they can observe a door, behind which they suspect may lie The Room. But after some time, someone exits it, and disappears below them into the rest of the Zone. Too many traps. They take some photographs for about ten minutes, and then leave the same way.
Monday night. Two more prospective navigators who have previously studied the Zone from the right side of the fence approach the drain with the same idea. What they overlook, however, is the presence of a brand new infra-red camera in a position on the fence line much nearer to the path the drain follows. It is at an angle as to be able to see them as they approach the fence, and its existence as a trap is unbeknownst to them before they are in the line of its sight. It eventually catches their eyes. As soon as they notice it, the two race up to the cage of the drain before the fence and go prone in some bushes, awaiting any stirring within the Zone that this may have triggered. Sure enough, about ninety seconds later, a vehicle pulls up above the vicinity just over the fence. A man gets out and begins shining a searchlight across the fields and woodlands around where they have approached. Eventually, he gets back into the van, and drives off. The navigators flee the vicinity.
On Tuesday night, a few other navigators approach the Zone from its other side. Their study has not been as thorough from the right side of the fence, and they have not noticed the rumbler on it. They instead focus their research to seeking a location on the fence that is obscured from the full scope its infra-red cameras. In a patch of dense woodland, they find a suitable spot. After waiting for a patrol to pass, they douse the razor wire with a piece of old carpet, rest a trellis they have brought against it, and climb it. They run across first some train tracks for product import and export to the site, then a portion of a materials yard formerly housing that which some of the site’s boilers were fuelled by, using patches of shadow to mark their slalom, before arriving at some bushes alongside some pipelines. From here, they slither under the pipelines, entering a kind of no man’s land between a pump house and a cooling tower, where an elevated conveyor network runs overhead. A ladder stretches down from it in a patch of darkness, leading into a trapdoor. They enter the conveyors, and proceed towards the same structure the original navigators encountered long ago. They make haste to the roof of the boiler house, to observe the behaviour of the patrols; to check the Zone’s vitals. They sit quietly, patiently, and trace a vehicle around the site as it prowls. It appears the patrol is not frenzied, has no urgency in its movement. Behaviour such as this indicates to the navigators that the Zone holds them in its favour, in good temper. But The Room is locked. There is no way forward to it. They manage a reverse route out without detection, and leave. Consulting in secrecy with other navigators who inform them of the rumbler’s presence they have overlooked, anyone privy to this exchange of information starts to build their flight plans based around the idea that the rumbler has been turned off after de-syncing.
On Wednesday night, two more attempt the same route. Rain lashes down. This time, they enter the same conveyor network at ground level, beside the yard. What they fail to notice in the mental abstraction a burst of quick movement in the Zone elicits is a new infra-red camera, in its design and features totally unsuited to monitor any operational process, its vision covering from the base of the conveyor upwards. They do not notice this animate trap, but it notices them as they proceed up the conveyors. Once they reach the boiler house, from the darkness of its upper floors, they hear the distant crackle and bleeps of a radio echoing from below. The navigators learn they are being hunted. The Zone is stirring, angry. They dart to the dark basement of the boiler house, crack an emergency exit a sliver, wait for several vehicles to pass towards the conveyor they were detected, and make a dash for the nearest spot on the fence, this time using the rumbler on its wrong side as a slim foothold, bloodying their hands on the razor wire with as quick and frantic a climb as possible as vehicles headlights draw nearer to them, the clarity of the patrol’s vision blessedly obscured by the heavy rain. They escape, but they have pissed the Zone off.
Thursday night: another few navigators draw near to the Zone, with intent to use the raised pipeline network to move towards its larger structures. They draw to the camera blind spot at the fence, and begin to climb it. One makes it over, laying prone in shrubs that run alongside it, whilst the other begins to climb. Suddenly, the previous anti-clockwise patrol which had passed a couple of minutes prior returns into view. Coming clockwise, he on the wrong side of the fence frantically reascends. They retreat far away from the Zone, across fields and landlines, before the searchlight can catch up to them. Analysis of this event concludes that the rumbler has been turned back on in the space of a day. Others attempt in the following weeks, trying to find trees to climb before jumping into the Zone over the fence, risking camera visibility and tempting patrols, as the Zone’s own knowledge of its pregnability continually improves. Word of how the navigators get on doesn’t spread amongst their peers now. Need-to-know knowledge of the status of its traps starts to lag behind the pace at which the Zone is mutating, and the first wave of navigators – no more than a baker’s dozen individuals by this stage – fades out.
Several months pass and parts of the Zone start to become unrecognisable. Demolition personnel move in; conveyors and pipes come down, rooms are stripped, apparatus is dismantled, machines scrapped. A second wave of navigators begins to attempt to forge their way deeper into the Zone with mixed success as even more fantastical ballets of traps make themselves known and disappear intermittently across the whole spectrum of a British winter’s weather conditions. Its traps mutate daily; appearing, disappearing, reappearing, morphing. For those very few who reach the Room, their assurance in returning to the fence as they came becomes fragile.
Whether just a coincidence, the very first scene filmed for the production of Stalker was the characters’ final approach toward The Room through – funnily enough – some kind of drain at first, followed by a sand-covered hall, within which the stalker himself is at his noticeable peak of resolve and alertness to the anticipated traps ahead. The characters have travelled far, for over ninety minutes of screen time in Tarkovsky’s Zone, but the man himself appeared to feel it was valuable to start bringing his visualisation of the Zone to screen with the tense eve of The Room. The denouement then comes as the stalker and his guests dawdle tentatively outside ‘the threshold to The Room’, with the artefact’s undisclosed ambiguity behind the camera. They lament further between each other about its rumoured powers before deciding they are actually not ready to take on the alien embellishment that has drawn them to The Room in the first place. It is here that the film student must think most critically in search of meaning, but for the trespasser who holds a real account with the Zone, what strikes him more is that the scene then fades to black, screenplay returning seconds later with the characters all back in the bar they met at before entering the Zone.
The departure from the Zone is in many ways just like this. It always wants to be forgettable. By the parameters of the game being played, the score is 1-0 to the trespasser at the The Room. The scoreline now has two possible outcomes by full time: 1-0 or 1-2. There is no draw, no shared spoils. With obscurity in recollection testimony to success, the less remarkable the retention of the scoreline the more preferable to all parties. No quarter for Hansel or Gretel, one breadcrumb left on the navigators’ trail before they embark back can produce quite a butterfly effect. Once the navigator has had his time with the Room, the more impatient he is naturally inclined to become if he remains in the Zone. Such a headspace will reflect back on how the mood of the Zone feels to him. The departure begs to be quick, unremarkable, focused.
If a return has been able to be made to the fence unseen, crossing it outbound, though logically one’s last interaction with the Zone, does not lend a free hand. Whilst interacting with the fence in a way that ensures the right side of it is reached as quickly as possible is seductive in the moment after the night’s endeavours; traps on or around it which could lead to detection, triggered by this course of action, still negate its advantage. For the consequentiality of the Zone can extend to a boundary much more ambiguous: if it knows navigators have left it, it may lash out far into the realm of its immediacy, loose in the surrounding woods, fields, and lanes. The perfect navigation needs a perfect displacement, and a perfect displacement demands absolute invisibility until the account with the Zone is completely settled.
The high – the hit; the fix – comes after. The sun is yet to protrude above the horizon, but the level of twilight hovering in the sky, balming the fields and seeping into the woods is a little bit more noticeable than when the navigators trod this path several long hours ago. Noise from within the Zone suddenly seems quashed, meek. That encroaching industrial din which gently sucked the calm from them and spat it back out as cud of frenzy pinches their cheek and wishes them the best. Birdsong begins to reverberate around the right side of the fence; the faint sound of distant cars picks up as the navigators walk towards a public road. As those in nearby civilisation with short-straw shifts or early rising habits start to put the kettle on, the navigators pass their front windows in a kind of trance-like swagger.
If you were to stop them in their tracks and ask them about what they have just gained, and are now embracing, they would stutter indefinitely, for it is for them now both a phenomenon, yet unquantifiable. They have been trespassing deep inside the Zone, a fortified site, but it is only them, and those they elect to be privy, for whom such a statement is applicable. They have been existing in an incorporeal state for the night as far as anyone except themselves can ascertain, and it is as if the daybreak has brought them back to the familiar world bestowed with both a kind of understanding and contentment the ghosts of wise men embody in tales from ancient times. The navigators pause, turn, and look back at the Zone in the distance, lofting over its surroundings, with a stark visceral evocation of the timeline which manifested under the cover of darkness for them. The effect they feel on them from their account with the Zone is, the further they distance themselves from it, bizarrely paradoxical; it feels profound, to an overcoming degree, yet also silly, petty. They have engineered a self-inflicted memory of rogue autonomy to cling to between themselves, nourished by whatever collection of photographs or film they have been bothered to capture, which will ebb and flow in its fervency to them alone and no one else.
With their backs to the Zone it is hard to take away from the navigators that they have respected it properly, been courteous to its paradigm, and departed with a personal, exclusive passage of time spent with it which feels of malleable conceptuality. For the next week they will be able to enjoy a sort of cryptic joy upon thinking about it, but in the years beyond they will perversely go through a broader range of befuddling emotions pondering what they really made of the Zone. They stop, turn, and stare once more at the distinctive structures. The sense of littleness, irrelevance, invisibility, and thus peace – which they have projected every fibre of their capability to achieve amidst the throes of the Zone – feels befitting. I’m told by those who have spent a lot of time within it that the Zone is a phenomenon those who have not felt this littleness cannot understand.
First of all: sorry. A bit of an ordeal of a read. This was the first essay I ever wrote about UE. Perhaps it shows. Compelled at the time to explore drawing these parallels between the Strugatsky and Tarkovsky Zone and what was fixating my curiosity, obsessions – this practice of recreational trespass on large industrial sites in Britain – I thought: really, this is something right here! Stalker, the Zone, it’s real, it’s not fantasy, not just imagination, and only a few of us know about it because only a few of us scale the relevant fences. This is a big deal, I need to write all this down, present a theory. And though perhaps a little hyperbolic, I think its gist still stands. The potency of this kind of trespass has not wavered after some years still. There remains no experience in British, perhaps global UE that those of us who invested these hours into the Zone can still closely compare to it.
The Zone represents something of simple importance to the urban explorer principally as a proving ground to develop, progress and set the standards of creatively moving across a three-dimensional open world designed to be able to detect the player. They are frontiers; each one presenting a different terrain capable of interacting with the trespasser in all manner of different ways and subject to great change in both an immediacy and a longer term, change which in turn determines how the trespasser is able to interact with them over the course of their lifespan from operational sites to pile of rubble.
It is unclear for how long a phenomenon of Zone like this has been happening. Whilst accounts of recreational spelunking, after-hours exploration of sewer systems, underground railway systems, utility tunnel systems and photographically motivated studies of derelict buildings in the twentieth century are verifiable, evidence of such wide games at heavily securitised sites like this in motion before the late 2000s continues to elude us. Though to conclude it was not yet born in any manifestation is a potential fallacy, no evidence of a phenomenon of Zone like this has yet to resurface in the digital age.
Perhaps it is that the parameters of what defines the phenomenon did not exist. Insufficient technological advancement in perimeter defence and less ballistic health and safety laws, terrorism and activism paranoia meant that some teenagers kicking a football over the fence of a site through which huge energy coursed and clambering over to retrieve it in, say, 1971, startled no one. Today, this is an entire incident; an entire response, an entire mountain of paperwork, half a dozen managers’ meetings on Monday. Or perhaps it was that none were drawn to the kind of infrastructure which forms the paradigm of today’s Zone with the same curiosity. Industry of this nature was far less out of sight and out of mind back then; clouds of black smoke and looming factory chimneys dominated the typical British urban landscape where apartment blocks and office buildings now stand. One wished to escape their umbra at every opportunity, lest get closer to it. Despite this, it still feels naïve to certify that it did not happen long ago, that infrastructure like this was not trespassed on for fun, out of a wholehearted curiosity, juvenile rebelliousness, or boredom. We may never know.
What we do know is that on the night of Friday, November 28th 2008, the phenomenon of Zone burst into full stride with one of the most remarkable acts of trespass ever recorded in Britain. “The £12m defences of the most heavily guarded power station in Britain” – John Vidal of The Guardian states in perhaps a slight exaggeration but with sufficient substance to his message – “have been breached by a single person who, under the eyes of CCTV cameras, climbed two three-metre razor-wired, electrified security fences, walked into the station, and crashed a giant 500MW turbine before leaving a calling card reading ‘no new coal’. He walked out the same way and hopped back over the fence.” This was a far cry from a series of misadventures Greenpeace had undertaken at the very same power station – Kingsnorth, Kent – merely six weeks earlier, where a group of six stormed the chimney to scrawl a message of environmentalism in large letters down the side of it before receiving their court dates, a mimic of the same organisation’s seminal stunt at Didcot in 2005. The Greenpeace stormings of the power stations were hallmarked by conspicuousness. The November 28th infiltration: totally the opposite. What the operating power company in tenure of Kingsnorth at the time attested was, between the lines, revelatory for our purposes: “this is a different league to protesters chaining themselves to equipment. This is someone treating a power station as an adventure playground. You have to be trained to work here. People do not just wander about on their own. […] Whoever it was has crossed a line they should not have gone over.”
The trespasser has never been found, nor spoken out, nor has his association been claimed by any activism groups. This was a loner. The public reaction was one of general apathy and the story barely a back pager. Only The Guardian and BBC News picked it up two weeks later. Readers of The Guardian article seemed more provoked by the author’s claim that five-hundred megawatts accounted for “two percent” of national electricity supply than the actions of the trespasser, but in the context of the Zone, of physical energy infrastructure security, of the simple notion of the fence, the message sent had an impact far beyond rallying against new coal power commissioning. The silent, skulking, furtive small outfit finding itself on the wrong side of the fence with enigmatic motives was now an utmost concern to keeping such national infrastructure absolutely undisturbed – and moreover that their bank-busting, state of the art class four perimeter fence with all singing and all dancing add-ons needed an even further revamp if it was to prove impermeable. The gauntlet to glimpse the interior of the Zone had fired its starting gun.
Over much of the 2010s, a tiny corner of UK UE headed in spirit by a handful of dynamic individuals – FB, TW and SL in particular – have silently pursued an obsessive compulsion to interact with these sites in this way. To as far lengths as they could, within measured reason and largely without their world beginning to fall down on top of them, they sculpted nights of operation far removed from anybody’s normality and returned with photographic material lacking equivalence.
It all starts, and positively remains for over ninety-nine percent of the operation, on the right side of the fence. With reconnaissance. A universal due diligence. “Have you looked at it?” – we say to each other upon any declaration of intent to interact with a site. The coterie has grown an expertise in physical security. We are perhaps the most qualified people in Britain to carry out an audit on the physical permeability of any site to intrusion. We know exactly what it takes to keep us out better than the site itself does. No team could provide more insight. We would be the industry standard. But the business is hard to start. “Hello,” we say awkwardly, as we stroll up to the gatehouse. “We’ve just been walking around the perimeter of your site, and we’ve identified several portions where there could be a potential security risk.” The man in the gatehouse may feel obliged to reach for his walkie-talkie in his coat breast pocket. “We’ve written up a report assessing the viability of possible – ” … No. We are too non-compliant.
razorwire.rip 