The tail end of the email reads what the length and breadth of its few hundred recipients will regard as a reasonable measure. “As always, it is asked that any mention of or material alluding to the event is strictly kept offline until further notice; unfortunately, the UK is home to a high density of ‘special characters’, and given the risk they present to the operation, we must have total assurance they are completely removed from the equation.”
Just like any microcosm of any society, there is a class war afoot. The tasteful and the tasteless don’t like each other, nor do the courteous and the brash, the introverts and the extroverts, the conservatives and the hedonists. And in this episode, it all comes down to the question of “who goes there?” Which interlopers were physically to be found at location x and point in time y, why are they newly equipped with the knowledge to access location x, how exactly did this come to transpire, who else has been informed of this news? And what do the various interested parties, crowded round the parapet, make of it all? The chief inquisitions will be through what mishandling a dissemination of sensitive knowledge has resulted, the extent to which it has further spread, whether any work has been ruined, and whether any scope for future work has been compromised. Sometimes, sadly, this is exactly the case, to the great annoyance of my preferred protagonists and the great ignorance of my preferred antagonists. For too many maggots cannot feast on the same apple indefinitely.
In late summer, the tasteful throw their annual festivities in a half-dry storm drain. The choice of drain to host the festivities is ever-rotating – there’s a new endeavour each year and it could be anywhere in the world, but tonight we are under British soil. By grace of meticulous communal planning, trouble will not feature on the agenda. Bunting and fairy lights adorn convex walls, dozens of kegs of home-brewed ale have been rolled down a manhole and upstream for gratuitous enjoyment, strobe lights scuttle around brickwork and reinforced concrete, and – as the night is young – some eighties funk echoes through the tunnel from a full sound system rig before it all reverts to the raver’s old faithful jungle later. A crowd of trespassers has gathered, drawn here from fountainheads myriad. Australians, Californians, Midwesterners, New Yorkers, Cantonese, Scandinavians, Western Europeans and Ukrainians, all donning waders on top of dinner jackets and dresses, have floated downstream on over a hundred pre-purchased lilos for their grand entrance, piled up at the water’s edge.
The guests are all catching up with each other, blithely discussing their recent adventures; sharing photos, stories, laughs, impressions. In UE, such freedom of speech rarely happens so nonchalantly, but because everyone in attendance here holds a firm, prerequisite belief that everyone else present is the right kind of character, there is no need for censorship, for smoke and mirrors. The festivities’ guest list is demonstrably exclusive, though not in a traditional sense. It is not meticulously hand-picked, nor ticketed. It is far more organic. A harmonious conglomeration of what can be described as sound and like-minded people on a need-to-know basis, here, in the drain, in black tie, by a pile of a hundred lilos. The number of gatecrashers to this festivities’ edition? Zero. The guests all got the email, and have kept the logistics of the event shared with them in its run-up a secret, because they all understand the fact that it relies on just that to be pulled off. A mutual recognition of the nature of the operation creates a sensible dependability, and that’s the kind of people these lot seem to be.
Meanwhile, the tasteless are also out and about – somewhere they shouldn’t be. Several decades after it first began to be used recreationally by trespassers, a small group is making its way into an abandoned building. They hold their phones out in front of them, recording video of every step, both of the environment and on-the-go pieces to camera. “Oh my god, guys, look at all this” – they say of the abandoned building. Turgid profanities of shock come one after the other as they turn a corner, poke into a room, reveal a corridor, inspect an object. Repeat. Little of any note occurs, then they leave. Returning home, the laptops open. The rolling footage and accompanying photographs, crude in form, go straight on to the internet. Big social media platforms. Titles are laid down thick. The caps lock key stays on, the exclamation marks come out in force. Phrases like ‘top secret’, verbs such as ‘found’, and nouns in the vein of ‘mission’ can be expected. If they’re really going for it – if they’re really tasteless – they might lead it all with a headline that they saw a ghost, a corpse, hell, that the Men In Black came after them. An internet audience dead from the neck up nonetheless gathers; gawking, impressed, wowed, fascinated with it.
The tasteful are not impressed. A friend of theirs, a lay-person who is not aware of the contexts of UE politics, asks innocently and benignly if they have seen this video of the ‘mission’ where the ‘explorers’ ‘found’ the ‘top secret’ abandoned place. “This is the kind of thing you do, that you’re into, right?” The inner snob of even the most demure of the tasteful leaps out in response. “No, no, no” – they begin to lecture – “this is garbage.” They become snappy, hasty to educate that, for starters, they know this particular location well, they’ve been there before, that this video their friend has mistakenly thought they would enjoy viewing is in fact a great scourge to them. They drone on, progressively irritable – “we didn’t feel the need to share this place on social media when we visited. And the exaggerated title, fishing for exposure? It’s so cringeworthy. Besides, I’ve seen more places of a superior quality than they’ve had hot dinners – this? It’s third rate. Do these bottom feeders not feel embarrassed? Not to mention, more trash will descend on this place now thanks to this video, and it’ll be done for.” The friend, who doesn’t understand the dynamics of this class war, is already jaded. Such a big fuss he has inadvertently walked into, all after showing a well-meaning and naïve interest in this strange hobby! Get over it – what’s the big deal?
The deal is bigger for some than it is others, at some places than it is others, at certain points in time than others; and political from start to finish. Quite why the tasteful would be less than pleased to discover the tasteless have giddily broadcast a shoddy set of pictures and videos from somewhere of little significance to either of them onto the social media airwaves at such a point in time is a highly esoteric arrangement, and one accompanied by a quintessentially British state of affairs: an attempt to impose a loose umbrella of unwritten rules over an activity centred around breaking rules about just how rules should be broken. We have here a snapshot of the great political rift of UE; one which would not be applicable to a sport, a skill, or really anything besides a collection-based activity. It is exceptionally applicable to the curious case of UE because a core facet that all other collection-based activities entail is out the window: ownership. Different demographics with clashing ideals of how to wield outputs from often the same exploits, neither side possessing moral nor legal higher ground about their stake in it, are forced to share the same finite resources. The invisible hand leads the scene straight into a tragedy of the commons, conditions perfect for a classic pitting of hedonism against conservatism.
The tasteless demographic comprises a category of UE practitioner found globally, numbering high into five, maybe six figures of population. You can find them on the internet ad infinitum. They will not stop spawning, like some kind of mutant horde in a shoot-em-up video game. The English language simply lacks the scope of syntax required to justly ascribe not only the scale of the tasteless demographic, but the lunacy of its product. Seemingly fathomless numbers of online identities exist like plankton in a deep ocean void, prolifically sharing such a stupefyingly third-rate constellation of side-splittingly embarrassing visual and audiovisual garbage from locations falling within the urban explorer’s remit that it is enough to evoke an existential crisis in a tasteful observer, to convince him that he is, really, living in a simulation.
The British tasteless is a particular kind of pest too, for unlike his genera in Europe or America, he is often a lone operator. Feral. Undertake some substandard UE, keep the camera rolling, take some photos on the phone, react excitedly either on video or in brief written commentary, throw it online like bread to pigeons by the town square fountain – get a little lay audience to spur on the next episode. Old rope. He does not really know the full extent of who he is, and demonstrates a sorely elementary understanding of the hobby he purports to be crazy about, rendering his actions to the more tasteful hobbyist as laughable at the least. Peddling ultra-high dynamic range photographs of cannabis farm aftermaths in the attics of arsoned small businesses to local tabloids here, uploading a hundred photograph-thick album posing in some sort of halloween mask in a mouldy old house to Facebook there. The circus just won’t move out of town. For the British tasteless, an out-and-out unawareness of any kind of wider context to other practitioners or standard to hold his chosen trade to is prerequisite to his approach.
All right then, says the devil’s advocate: and why should he strive to be anything else? Why not, if he’s having fun – in a world void of ownership, void of levels of honed skill or result-determined matchplay? Why shouldn’t he be oblivious to any grand scheme of UE standard, how ugly he comes across to others, whose toes are being trod on, how consummate at showcasing subject matter he strikes the tasteful conservative as, what significance a destination he finds himself in carries to anyone else who trespasses as he does?
The conservative rebuttal is that less is more, that the human disposition to keep a discovery of anything of positive consequence ‘within the family’ is natural, superior. But a pot of money or a nugget of gold, for instance, brings the factor of ownership into the equation. A dogmatic ‘finders keepers’ – that’s just how it is in that scenario. Things are straightforward. An obsolete structure or man-made locality can’t work like this. Nobody can keep it, nobody can move it. The finder can only hope nobody else finds it, lest finds a way to use it, and the degree to which the finder can become upset about such information dispersing to undesirable parties is therefore limited before it becomes frankly silly, childish to those emotionally uninvested looking on.
On the other hand, other alternative subcultures’ politics have worked with this dynamic for decades, and entirely comparable concerns prevail. Elder graffiti writers, for example, continue to be embroiled in an age-old class war against infringement by ‘toys’ – charlatan, attention-seeking writers – staining the cultural purity of what was once a hush-hush practice of vandalism and passionate anti-social protest steeped in anonymity into a “murky hinterland [of] fashionable aerosol stencil art and sixth-form politics-informed gentrification; the Esperanto of the visual language of the streets”, as told in Our Yards, a critical essay on the course of graffiti’s scene demographics in London. Not just countercultures, either. At a collector-owned aircraft museum a few years ago, I got talking to one of the volunteers. About sixty this guy, an amateur history enthusiast, particularly of the War years. Conversation soon arrived at the topic of military ruins. He shared an anecdote: “ages ago, this must have been the eighties… Some friends and I went on a trip to Normandy, to the landing beaches, and we stumbled across this terrifically preserved pillbox. It was lovely, what an artefact. I grew a real fondness towards it. But word of it must’ve gotten around, because sadly when we came back a few years later, it was trashed. I really wanted to look after it.”
More pertinent, the British tasteless is also blissfully ignorant of what he’s missing out on. He is on the outside, unable to look in. Doesn’t want to know – doesn’t need to know, happy in his own bubble. “Tut, tut”, the tasteful say. “If only he knew.” As a traditional class war pertains to a gulf in wealth, here in UE, we are talking about knowledge. Information. Intelligence, experience. The tasteful know an awful lot of things that the tasteless don’t; a prerogative which allows them to unlock a considerably higher echelon of both input and output of UE. Centre-stage to this social immobility is a feature of the British scene which I don’t believe plays such a central role in other countries’: a long-standing internet-based forum. ‘The forum’ gets a bad rap sometimes, mostly for being too cliquey, too regimented, too doctrinal. Newcomers sign up and take the brave step to share some photographs of an old building or whatever it is near where they live which they noticed recently, only for older heads to tell them that their photography is lousy, that their old building used to look prettier however many years ago, that what they’ve shared lacks the right bits of information listed alongside it, and so on. Because UE as an activity is intrinsically bespoke, by definition something demanding to be free and anarchic, only a slim amount are susceptible to feedback, and think “okay, I’ll try and do better next time to refine my product.” The rest: understandable immediate disenchantment.
Such an outcome, unfortunately, will discourage spending some time diving into the archives that have grown on the forum over its two-plus decades of life. This would in turn reveal the existence of an encyclopaedia. Lone operators who gripe with the forum for its rod of iron fail to realise that they are picking a fight with an organised and quality-controlled encyclopaedia – some parts of it viewable by invitation only but mostly for gratuitous public consumption – of everywhere, as good as all ROADS anyone has ever taken a closer look at in an exploratory capacity in Britain since the turn of the century. A complete library: pull out some material on anywhere, any abandoned building, any tunnel, any ruin you spot by the roadside – there will be a grassroots encyclopaedia entry or several on the forum about it (and this is before we begin to touch upon the private, invitation-only ‘non-public’ annals of the forum). Such a resource – of this level of completeness at least – is unique to global UE scenes. To disregard it is, whichever way you flip it, the antics of an outcast. The arc of the class war is that to such a table the tasteless brings nothing, yet to detract from it brattishly he is more than happy.
The forum probably also gets a bad rap because it’s called 28Dayslater, and with such a silly name, isn’t taken as seriously as it perhaps deserves. The story goes that the original owner of the URL used to buy domain names of upcoming films in the early 2000s and try to sell them back to production companies when they thought they ought to make a promotional website. He was an early urban explorer; went into old mines, took notice of buildings that appeared in a state of disrepair and what not. The production company for Danny Boyle’s zombie movie didn’t want the URL in the end, so with the post-apocalyptic theme on hand, he made hay with it anyway and started a space for posting about his and likeminded’s weekend outings, open to comments and contributions.
The first wave of users to actively partake in the forum has mostly faded into obscurity with time; a loss of interest in UE, hard-pressed for weekends at total leisure, family, career, a departure from ‘the loop’ and a lack of motivation to get back within it. What was their wellspring, their reasoning for coming across the hobby, developing an allure to the ROADS, getting involved in the online community? Such questions only actually lead to two answers. If it wasn’t on an own accord, it was because of Simon Cornwell. If you could go back in time and ask the minibus full of ten parked up outside the derelict hospital in 2002 why they are there: “We came across Simon Cornwell’s photos, and wanted to see it for ourselves…” Or why in 2004 the pair of young men with cameras draped around their necks are testing how feasible the gatepost round the back of the disused factory is for climbing: “Well, we saw Simon Cornwell’s website, and thought it looked cool…”
Where is Simon Cornwell now? What is the man like? Is he aware at all of this influence? Few know. The website is still up, greeting visitors with the twenty-year-old message: “Postmodern rambles tired of the rural scene? Or overcurious trespassers? Whatever. […] Enter if curious. We do.” When one of our lot managed to find him and talk to him in 2020, things checked out. Simon says that he’d “always liked ruins, dereliction, the spooky old house on the street, that sort of thing.” He “started to look around on the web to see what there was in about… 2000? There wasn’t much at all. All but nothing.” So he tried his hand at a fledgling craft that was to set a big part of the standard shape of the scene for a while to come: the personal blog. A personal space, a personal project. The wider influence was inadvertently unfurled, and for it all, Cornwell never went down as a pioneer. More like a sower. The jumping off point: publicist of the internet’s first considerably viewed gallery of photographs and thoughts on what happened to be – objectively – two of Britain’s most epic ever UE locations that whet an appetite many didn’t know they had for the exotic, the romantic and the spectacular lying beyond the fence.
What took so long? The strain of curiosity sentiment concerned with a desire to access new areas of environment, man-made or otherwise – to investigate, explore, snoop, see what’s round that corner, behind the door, over that hill, across that river – it’s ancient, nothing new. Many would argue it is something primal, of an innate chemistry. Yet its cultural emergence as UE was in all regards stunted; unnatural, disjointed, always a peculiarity. Despite there being little common sense in doubting that small numbers of folk couldn’t not have been snooping into the structural world beyond the fence already in some capacity for eternity, it took longer for a culturally gelled community of British people who liked to look around ROADS to organically form than it did for a world championship in ‘extreme ironing’ or Finnish sauna heat endurance to organise itself. Simon Cornwell’s photo-study of a derelict hospital in South London and a closed-down aircraft testing facility in Hampshire can be seen as the funnel, flowing such interest into the cup – that was to be 28Dayslater – which in turn overflowed into the thronged flood of disarray the hobby became heading into the 2020s. Preceding the internet, one can find documentation, literature or accounts of recreational trespass are nebulous and sparse.
Something of a genesis can be best identified in Cambridge, 1937. Here we find the Rosetta Stone of evidence that trespassing has been deliberately undertaken for a leisure activity, as some kind of game or project by several generations passed. Going by the pseudonym Whipplesnaith, one of a coterie of anonymous university students begins to pen with great attention to detail and palpable thoughtfulness an account of a world after dark completely their own, of precociousness with no near contemporary cultural equivalent, in the remarkable Night Climbers of Cambridge. Eventually seminal more so, even, to the boulderer or builderer, one can find that the students’ world in the small hours of the morning plucks at all the same chords today’s urban explorer knows well; the research of specific architectural nuances, the tension at operating undetected from passing ‘bobbies’ and night owl residents, the challenges of photographing in precarious, dark terrain, assessing self-determined degrees of accomplishment, the dynamics of a clandestine political approach to their coterie – the general emotional wringer of skulking in places one is not ‘allowed’ to be. It’s all there, lightning in a bottle.
Then: nothing, really. Night Climbers, for all its majesty, didn’t topple a bigger domino. Decades rolled by, Britain along with much of the rest of the world underwent its starkest cultural facelift ever and the future of human ambition was boundless. But nobody recreationally trespassing and writing about it. Street photographers made the odd portrait of derelict houses in the North and military history enthusiasts kept poking their heads in old pillboxes in the South; neither thinking anything of it so much as to pick up the pen, as to imagine they could develop something more with it.
In fact the only curious trespasser who appeared to pick up the pen here and there went by the name John Harris. As a boy turning young man through a period immediately following the War, John developed a runaway interest in stately homes across Britain which had been commandeered by the military during Wartime – for divisional headquarters, platoon billets, training grounds and safe artwork storage – before being abruptly handed back to their owners upon Victory in Europe, many of whom were no longer able to return to them. In an England of Enid Blyton’s idylls, John traversed the countryside with a backpack, a camera and a notebook on-and-off for the best part of a decade and half to delve mischievously beyond the fence and skulk around these empty manors, in doing so undertaking what may well be the first veritably thematic project of derelict building documentation on record. It was not until 1998, however, that one was able to read about it with the publishing of a memoir entitled No Voice From the Hall. In terms of reading material on something akin to UE coming out into the ether concurrently, the middle of the century stood silent.
Eventually, a UE scene popped up again. San Francisco, late seventies. Liberal cultural shifts in the decades prior epicentred in California created encouraging conditions for new brands of alternative lifestyles to emerge. And there it was. Some friends, calling their crew the Suicide Club, began to want to develop an identity, thing, do something kooky, and write about it. The theme was decided: the Club was to champion “letting go of fear”, and methods were to include what by all measures were proto-UE antics. “… The Club will explore the untravelled, exotic, and exhilarating experiences in life”, the memo read. Alongside going in for street theatre, pranks and parties themed around unusual venues, the Club is ostensibly the first outfit on record per modern definitions to really get stuck in to old buildings, tunnels and bridge climbing as is staple fare today. Minutes of exploits were penned thoroughly on internal circulars, and lasting in name for about five years, what the Club got up to is well documented and its attitude retrospectively outgoing, proud of its place in broader counterculture lore. The important takeaway from the Club’s approach was that it ushered in the angle that UE’s emphasis ought always be on felicity, novelty, surreality and social experiences. However you want it. All play, no deadlines and deliverables. This approach hasn’t gone anywhere. To the West, one can find particularly in Kansas City, Minneapolis and San Francisco still today core local scenes glued together by a more – let’s call it – bohemian and free-spirited operating culture than the rest of the Northern hemisphere.
Finally, in Britain: December, 1980. The more staid readers of the New Statesman, expecting their usual commentary on shifting monetary policy outlooks and interviews with Thatcher’s cabinet, may have been miffed to find this edition taking on a light-hearted festive theme. A figure in black tie shares a laugh with a cartoon drawing of Santa Claus, whilst a labour of moles scuttles over a Christmas tree and tinsel on the front cover. Perhaps not all readers – especially those window shoppers glancing over a copy in passing at the station newsagents for their commute home – would have spotted the lone mole holding a sign above a metal door behind this scene which says ‘nuclear button this way’. We have here the first refined, engaging report of British infrastructural UE surviving in print. Wryly comical yet straying minimally from the business the article intends to illuminate, investigative journalist Duncan Campbell may not have been aware until I had the privilege to sit down with him for an afternoon that with his two-thousand-word A Christmas Party for the Moles he had broken a forty-plus-year hiatus of what after maturation would qualify as essential UE literature as many years later.
Written delivery aside, the location in discussion is momentous. Playing the part of an employee and tailgating a friend who worked in a BT office in central London down to its basement, Campbell proceeded to saunter through a city-spanning network of hardened communications tunnels known as Q-Whitehall – and more colloquially as the BT Deep Level – somewhere that the advancement of infrastructural securitisation and heightened state paranoias have rendered an overstretch for today’s measured urban explorer. Campbell went on to publish War Plan UK two years later, a piece of investigative non-fiction revealing – this time from a safer distance – the fine details on a plethora of classified Cold War subterranean infrastructure, of perennial relevance to the British urban explorer. Duncan has a mild interest in what some of us have been up to since. But someone of Duncan’s sophistication hasn’t a monkey’s for who’s posing in front of what spectacle. He is more interested in such matters as: ‘to what other communication lines do the wires in the back of the telephone exchange in the classified Cold War bunker point’ and other such buried histories of the state only such deviance could surface.
As it turned out, Duncan was not to make the sole effort in the study of off-limits structures under Britain during the 1980s. Some years prior, a lady of academic sophistication called Sylvia Beamon had formed a small society which took interest, primarily, in the archaeology of Britain’s caves, as well as what one might call man-made ‘oddities’ lying underground through fieldwork. Her personal interests focused on the history of ice houses, the roles of caves in Britain’s medieval folklore, and a rather novel field of study into the purported healing effects that the atmosphere within salt mines could have on an ailing respiratory system. Conceived as a civilised, formalised and organised group of active spelunkers, she had named it: Subterranea Britannica. Its members soon took a short cut around this mouthful: Subbrit rang nicely.
Listed in the Directory of British Associations – a sort of early Yellow Pages for hobbyist clubs – a small and diverse membership took up. Then one day in the late seventies, Subbrit was to stumble upon a defining happenstance. Two members out and about exploring a series of flint caves under Surrey happened to bump into a father and son doing the same thing. They told them – the father having taken his son to see the caves by torchlight on a journey of nostalgia, as he used to play in them as a boy in the 1920s – about their business in the caves; about Subbrit. Clearly like-minded, the father and son were invited to join the society.
The son’s name was Nick Catford. Almost overnight, Nick became a vital figure within Subbrit, and over the next decade catapulted its scope in a wealth of directions. Catford was as far as one can tell Subbrit’s first member to embody an ambitious pursuit of something close to the currency of epic UE trades today. From the early eighties right through into the 2000s, Catford drove Subbrit to chart almost the entirety of that beneath British soil which holds an allure to today’s urban explorer: mines, railways, boutique tunnels and much more before UE was UE. Especially, off Campbell’s earlier exposés, ‘prolific’ does not do justice in attributing how Subbrit peeled back the rest of the veil around Britain’s copious Cold War bunkers as Gorbachev settled Western nerves.
Though never averse to “strolling into somewhere if it was wide open” per UE rules, Nick deployed a prodigious capability – to an effectiveness none have ever come anywhere near – at wangling legitimate opportunities to access locations which had seen counts of ‘extra-curricular’ visitors in their lifetime seldom exceed zero. Befriending London Underground station supervisors to borrow sets of keys, farmers who owned the land above nuclear bunkers upon their declassification, corporate middle-managers, local council officials and even military officers whilst leveraging Subbrit’s image as a formal archaeological outfit and making hay while the less bureaucratic, less suspicious world of thirty-or-forty years ago shone, when Nick Catford asked the right level of person for a look around their installation to take documentary photographs, it seemed everyone forgot how to say ‘no’.
Notwithstanding the remarkable quality and quantity of research that Subbrit demanded as a pre-internet project, its fame in British UE today is largely down to how this body of work has been catalogued for posterity. When Subbrit took itself online, Nick and its keenest members spent years meticulously assembling a mapped encyclopaedia of subterranean Britain the standard and comprehensiveness of which 28Dayslater has long had to play catch-up to. Though never considered as or associated with outright deviant UE, Subbrit’s work continues to be a launchpad for UE’s capacity to take its own game to the remnants of Cold War Britain and beyond. An urban explorer who has managed to worm his way underground to somewhere promising of epic ought be well aware that this kind of predecessor will have likely trodden this way moons before him.
Despite UE going on to find devoted congregations above all in Russia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and North America today, its first true Mass gathered far away. Whilst Europe and America were going about their day, a teenager on the other side of the world was fast asleep and dreaming. When he woke, he discerned that in the dream, he had been sliding through some kind of never-ending concrete pipe. And so the next night. And the one after. The dream about the concrete pipe recurred, so much as to trigger something akin to what one would imagine activates a sleeper agent in our teenager.
His home is Melbourne, and Australia, as if coincidentally, is teeming with a great deal of stormwater drains. The continent is rather unique in terms of their population. Construction efforts on the boil since the mid-nineteenth century with a view to divert flash flood-prone rivers, mitigate agricultural waterlogging and enhance water supply, these drains are not only compartmentalised from the country’s sewage nexus, they are also spacious; often resembling the wide Californian ‘spillway’ type-structure one presumes that the LA river – star of those car chases from generic eighties action movies – disappears into. Rounding up two of his classmates, they slunk away after school one day, and into their nearest stormwater drain they went.
It’s the mid-eighties, and through the summer, the three would set out on their bikes into the boondocks in search of the next drain every minute of free time they were afforded. Soon, they began to yearn for company; their obsession divested into an aspiration to conjure together a community of sub-surface dwelling friends, a nationwide network of like-minded tunnel-obsessed who would traverse the stormwater drains of all Australian states together. Our recurring dreamer – his mates called him Dougo – stuck flyers to telegraph poles, pitched to acquaintances of acquaintances in passing, and scrawled home phone numbers on the back of his hand to this avail. It took a few more years, but eventually, there was a trans-national headcount that felt like something. The cult of the Australian stormwater drain was no longer a three-piece. A christening was due: Cave Clan.
Spurred on, Dougo speculates, by the contemporaneous release of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic and its protagonists’ choice of residence, Cave Clan emerged by the end of the eighties as the world’s next natural sequence of underground scene dealing in enjoying the off-limits man-made environment. Its growth in profile prompted Dougo, creatively inclined and fond of doodling, to begin a home-made photocopied magazine project to nurture the scene further. Spoofing a tabloid newspaper, so came about Il Draino. Containing comic strips, recaps of social events and suchlike, Il Draino was now the only organic UE material being printed anywhere.
Cave Clan’s longevity continues, renowned in international UE circles for sculpting the schematic for alternative jamboree outside of the public realm. Notwithstanding, Cave Clan has for long been in many ways a more political scene compared to UE’s modern social media-driven backdrop. In an effort to keep the scene it fostered largely civil, free of the – well, kind of all-out nutter one might expect to gravitate toward anarchic life in a drain – ‘membership’ became selective through a council model. Disregarding concomitant politics, this has not been without silver linings. In a bigger picture, Cave Clan strives to care for those prospectively drawn below the manholes and teach foremost of danger. For of all the realms to which UE leads its risk takers; heights of such precariousness as to make the vicarious viewer’s palms sweat, zero-clearance railway tunnels, monoxide-filled mines, the high seas and corridors of live electrics; it is in fact the drain, in combination with flash acts of God, which has proved by far its most deadly.
In keeping with a synonymously Australian emphasis on the entailing sub-practice of ‘draining’ – which has produced such a legacy as to remain eternally core to the UE umbrella – many involved with Cave Clan have gone on to become amongst the world’s most accomplished urban explorers, comprising by all measures unmatched experts on the world’s subterranean waterway systems in a capacity beyond any traditional study.
The nineties blew some more wind in UE’s sails; in particular traces of elusive writings and activity by Muscovite troglodytes, kicking off what would flourish into a stunning Russian scene, and, more accessibly to the UE historian, things in North America taking shape. In Toronto, some friends had started figuring UE out as a new hobby and embarked on their own black-and-white magazine project about it. The second of its kind beyond Il Draino, they named it Infiltration. Edited at large by a man named Jeff Chapman with an alias of Ninjalicious, Infiltration was both literary and community-focused, aiming to serve a forum function before internet usage took off and get its readership involved in its creation as much as possible. Through twenty-five issues in nine years, Infiltration covered and wrote on a good breadth of now matured niches and general mischief within the UE remit. Later accompanied by two associated online spaces at infiltration.org and uer.ca, still in stasis for today’s browser, this was as far reaching a fertile ground in the Northern hemisphere as the hobby had seen. Not least, many accredit the coinage of the term urban exploration itself to Infiltration.
Premature curtains sadly drew over Infiltration in 2005 when Chapman succumbed to long term illness complications at a tender age. The culmination of his writings survives as Access All Areas, a self-published how-to guide of considerable length aimed at those looking to pick up the hobby. The best word to describe Access All Areas is: cute. With tips from “try to find parts of the floor that are the least creaky, usually these are just above the joists” to “you may want to ask a member of the fairer sex to come along with you on infiltrations, because as women are made of sugar, spice and everything nice, they tend to come under much less suspicion than men in a situation of confrontation”, Chapman really thought of every minutia of homework and laid it out paternally. To revere Access All Areas may be a little odd, but bashing it is crass. It also contains an appendix ‘UE timeline’ of sporadic nuggets of the hobby happening which even the internet has struggled to catch. These include an 1861 Brooklyn Standard article on visiting a newly disused train tunnel, and how hearsay had it that a model railway enthusiasts’ society at MIT used to organise hush-hush jaunts into the utility tunnels below campus in the late fifties.
To what was happening there in Toronto, a similar mini-scene was unfolding in New York. Two eccentric buddies known as L.B. Deyo and David Leibowitz were going in for a parallel passion, making a magazine and rounding up a crew, calling theirs Jinx. Deyo and Leibowitz seemed to enjoy a bit of theatre and gimmick about their UE; they implemented a non-negotiable black tie/evening dress and Men In Black sunglasses dress code for their companions when out, sculpting character profiles as special agents crossed with gentlemanly scholars, this kind of stuff. They weren’t mucking about, mind, placing critical importance on exploring properly, courteously, staying well out of trouble. Their culmination was a thematic field project carried out in summer 2001 to explore New York in twelve sequences ‘head to toe’, from some of its oldest tunnels to high rising edifices via both abandoned and in use buildings and bridges at surface level. A targeted, local to-do list once more, in Night Climbers manner. Deyo and Leibowitz refined the reportage from this into a paperback titled Invisible Frontiers, of shared authorship.
Invisible Frontiers is really good for its age. Often overlooked on the bookshelf of today’s urban explorer who wants to collect some physical literature pertinent to his thing, Invisible Frontiers is perhaps the first literary effort agreeable to a more modern matrix of UE practice. Whilst the feats retold have not necessarily remained groundbreaking, historical context and personal emotion are engagingly captured to a great discernment, especially in Deyo’s passages – something which cannot be said for anything in print since. I am one of several who would love to sit down and have a chat with Deyo and Leibowitz. However, their whereabouts has become something of mystery. A few weeks after the final venture of their project, you know what happened, and Jinx promptly shut up shop in wake of heightened state paranoia. Two years later they somehow managed to get Invisible Frontiers to public market, via an arm of an arm of Random House no less, but after that, Jinx swiftly went from low profile to no profile.
In Britain, although nought of note in print, the late nineties saw the first online traces of UE emerge through a forum-type website called Dark Places. The domain in fact still persists, refusing to conk out, though is in most respects a time warp, hooked up to a life support machine. Dark Places was a forum predominantly for spelunkers to talk everything caves and mines, which happened to become a port of call for a handful of very early derelict building enthusiasts with no hub yet to call their own. The cavers – matured hobbyists – began to see quite against their will dribs and drabs about the ‘spooky old house on the street’ clog their forum bulletins. Its administrators soon announced they were fed up with the bandwidth that harbouring this miscellanea was costing, and the little derelict building enthusiasts’ corner was sent packing. It set up its refugee camp around 2002, about the same time Cornwell’s blog comes into play, at a domain called Derelictplaces, before bandwidth woes again caused a few of its users – one the man with the 28Dayslater address – to start an ad-funded splinter gig for what had by now become a ripened huddle of early urban explorers. 28Dayslater was to be the right forum at the right time to cement alongside Cornwell’s gallery as Britain’s go-to online destination for the ever-growing crowd stumbling upon the hobby.
The mid-to-late noughties revealed a golden age of UK UE, dominated by a copious supply of mass-closed decaying Victorian lunatic asylums and collieries to last more weekends than one knew what to do with. Reports on almost everything happening ran on routes between personal blogs via the mainline junction of 28Dayslater. With the advent of the forum’s ‘non-public’ section for the more cultivated and sensitive efforts at garnering epic, these were salad days; the height of an everyone-knows-everyone, village way of life the hobby was to see. The tasteless character was yet to fully devolve, with the few grievances that did headline from time to time mainly limited to differing opinions on the ethics of ‘rescuing souvenirs’ from old buildings. Whilst the demonstrable epic readily available to any newcomer was widespread, there was an excitement about what was to come next: deeper tunnels, higher vantage points, tougher fences. Sunday evenings were set aside by keen browsers like a television show before the days of on-demand viewing to read through the reliable ‘post-weekend drop’ and see what had been turfed up in the prior forty-eight hours. Things were nicely balanced; the relative unpopularity of UE versus both the known and uncharted material available to play with, the hymn sheets being sung from, and the still-tiny scene’s productivity in farming the commons.
Entering the 2010s, clouds of what was to become a defining Malthusian problem were already forming. Now, not every newcomer walked straight into the arms of the forum (in Britain, or a grassroots nucleated community abroad such as Cave Clan). The village hall began to burgeon; rows of newbuilds started to erect on the edges of the farmsteads. More UE content began to settle on the big social media platforms, new sub-scenes focusing on specific types of location or infiltration grew cliquey and political rifts opened. The flock had dispersed at the Collie’s bark.
Fitting (or unfitting) of this period was the publication of two more paperbacks, the first since Access All Areas and what were to be the last for even longer. Book one of two chronologically and the lesser commotion-stirrer, Hidden Cities by Moses Gates – a centre-stage trans-Atlantic figure of the time turning over the roofs and drains of New York, London, Paris and so forth after dark – strikes the reader as not a great deal more than the memoir of a chuffed big kid, again placing the emphasis on UE as a lifestyle and vehicle for fun. In the Club’s school of thought regarding using the urban environment as a playground for new experiences, Hidden Cities is pretty harmless, and apt material with which to get an idea of some of the more alternative characters who have found a home in the hobby, who by night seek to move through a different world to everyone else.
More controversial, transcending into infamy no less, was 2013’s Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett. It went like this. Garrett, an American academic, is not long into a visiting humanities professor stint at a London university when he crosses paths with a highly-strung, reticent and relatively young sub-scene concerned with infiltrating below-surface infrastructure, with a particular mania about railway networks. Usually prevaricative and looking over their shoulders, they for one reason or another take Garrett in wholeheartedly. As guest to their nightly outings, Garrett becomes obsessed with this inner city, subterranean infiltration brand of UE as a vehicle with which to re-write the manuscript of psychogeography, and in a whirlwind couple of years comes out with an academically-slanted yet quite agenda-driven popular non-fiction book themed on ‘place-hacking’, ‘reclaiming ownership of the off-limits’, and ‘what it feels like to crack the surface and find the city’s edge’ through the lens of his new mates, whom he dubs the London Consolidation Crew.
Beats me how it goes down in the geography scholars’ mess room, but for Garrett’s aspirations of ascension to a celebrated figure stature within the UE scene, it’s a lead balloon. Crucially, the timing hits a bit of a nerve. It hasn’t been long at all since the LCC were in the throes of one of UK UE’s first really tedious run-ins with trouble, and wounds are still being licked. Garret, in that corner – beset with egotistical tendencies as his autobiographical Wikipedia page can illustrate – opted to play the prisoner’s dilemma and throw the rest of his LCC under the bus. No winners emerge; front doors are kicked down and hard drives are confiscated across the board. He is in the dog house with his former mates, to put it lightly, and this gossip regarding his credit in London spreads further afield. Then, Explore Everything: he wants the pulpit back, to see through what he had begun. Eyes roll. Those close to him in its genesis are first to scold: too little anonymity, too exposing, too much indulgent inference to the work of others, too heavy an air of the ponce. It’s a New York minute before he starts to become widely regarded as one of UE’s first ever high-profile frauds, and not least among London’s elder graffiti writers for the public exposure he has brought to underground railway trespass, he becomes indefinite persona non grata round about town. Garrett slinks away overseas to pastures new, continuing to peddle the popular non-fiction trade on this or that other topic when not in the seminar hall. Today, largely due to this context, the book’s legacy has not been kind. Despite touching on some good sociological conversations here and there, conceptual UE thought presented in tasteful circles even ten years down the line is still mostly tarred with a chi-chi brush of Explore Everything’s bristles.
Such a bad taste was left, in fact, that what could have been a decade of trailblazing literature for the sharp ends of scenes far and wide, of insightful essaying and reporting coming to print, was neutered there and then. The urban explorer lost in the bookshop since has had no choice but to scavenge for scraps loosely related to a few of his hobby’s themes off a steady production line of paperbacks largely concerned with what amounts to soporific pottering about. The daytime TV of the kosher ROADS visitor. If the least wearying option of these – listening to that guy with an acoustic guitar at the party Nick Hayes smoke up in a gamekeeper’s wood and lament landed gentry’s enduring relevance to modern British land ownership in The Book of Trespass – doesn’t take your fancy, one can always lumber through the gushing litany of generic man-with-a-pen Robert Macfarlene receiving a tour of a potash mine in Underland, or put the kettle on to small town girl Cal Flyn waxing lyrical about how foliage is re-growing on both ruined wartime forts on the Forth river as well as around the apartment buildings of Chernobyl, don’t you know, in Islands of Abandonment. Even these are recommended before banishing oneself to having overbearingly conceited ‘professional burglar’ Jenny Radcliffe tout how easy it is for her to tailgate her way into an office building and snoop through company records in her memoir The People Hacker. Who am I to say that what’s for sale in half of Waterstones or Foyles is any more worth his time, but at this point the urban explorer who’s been around a bit – seen what he’s seen, done what he’s done to see it – ought find similar stimulation from watching paint dry.
As the worldwide popularity of UE exploded entering the middle of the decade with the rise of social media, arguably the most in-demand genre of all came forward as what has long been referred to as ‘rooftopping’. This is recreational trespass concerned with accessing the roofs of in-use or under construction high-rise buildings to enjoy the entailing spectacle, a mainstay in urban environment navigational challenge through which to unlock new angles to any city. Though happening on record since the time of Night Climbers – not least in its more modern incarnation since Infiltration and Jinx – one can point to roughly 2014 from when a commodification of it started to splinter. After the release of a viral video by two Russians sneaking to the top of an under construction Shanghai Tower on a New Year holiday, tens of thousands of restless young people were enraptured by the thought that they could seek this kind of thrill too. As everything under the UE umbrella is instantly replicable, requiring no training or rehearsal, it soon became a reality for them.
Dozens of millions of views racked up on the video and other examples like it as a craze began to orbit core UE in many of the world’s major cities. The cityscape photograph or video clip from as high rising a structural vantage point as feasible quickly came to embody the most marketable outcome – in terms of exposure and reception by both fellow practitioners and a wider lay audience alike – that one could obtain from any undertaking that fell within the UE remit. And still. An infinite hall of mirrors for the social media algorithms replenishes itself each minute, and the effects of such practical saturation have been on show for some time. In London, for example, new skyscraper developments in the City and Docklands have since reached the end of their tethers with this nuisance, making it common practice to acquire High Court injunctions to criminalise and deter a veritable epidemic of youths itching to run up their stairwells for photo shoots day and night. A tremendous number of tasteless characters have sadly arisen from this cradle, yet plenty who do it tastefully and intersect pleasantly with the other UE circles have too.
This was by no means to say that the abandoned and forgotten were heading out of fashion. The stock of the spectacle of ‘beauty in decay’, the romance of ghost towns ‘left just as they were’ and the exoticism of ‘physical manifestations of lost memories’ hiding behind closed doors had never been higher. Commercially-driven photobooks on abandoned this, abandoned that were being churned out for art gallery gift shops at an annual rate, the aesthetics merits of the entropic dereliction of the man-made were gaining more and more conventional appreciation by the day, and bookings for minibus tours around Chernobyl were selling out well beyond their operators’ wildest forecasts. This brand of UE found an apex in the middle of the decade with the genesis of a quasi international ‘circuit’ of abandoned places offering at the very least exceptionally high doses of spectacle, if not exoticism and romance too; a sort of organically-curated few-dozen abandoned wonders of the world trail. Much of the circuit remains a rite of passage for jet-setters who take their passion for this stuff to such a mantle. Whilst trekking several days in stealth to rusting Soviet space shuttle prototypes sitting under an old hangar in the middle of Baikonur cosmodrome has cemented as the famed pinnacle of the circuit, all across the globe more pocket-sized collectables – like certain specific old grand homes, monuments, boats, theme parks, theatres, vehicle collections and so forth – deemed to have their curves in all the right places still feature as almost obligatory pilgrimages for the jet-set ‘big game hunter’.
Somewhere along the line, the tasteless character came out of the woodwork in a swarm. Across the world, the larvae were fed their oxygen by the rise of big social media culture against a backdrop of an exponential realisation that UE was – one – a reliable source of instant gratification, and – two – something anyone could immediately set about doing. Couple this, in Britain, with the very bottom level of intelligence and cultivation demonstrated by a stunningly enormous underclass existing in urban areas hallmarked by visual depravity and an irreversible trajectory of local ruination, and it really is no wonder. The plague began to devour the crops.
The tasteless presented neither solely as rooftopper nor ‘beauty in decay’ fanatic, neither ‘big game hunter’ nor tunnel troglodyte; but an ungainly, grotesque jumble of them all, his every passing fancy broadcast online for all to see. He even got a high horse of his own: self-styled social media ‘explorers’ doing the rounds of the latest fashionable derelict places, for instance, started to get virtuous on local rough kids who went there just to smash it to pieces for fun. “Guys, stop ruining places!” they pleaded. It was all embarrassing, really. A stain. One could call it inevitable. Everyone needs an opposition, an us versus them. This is UE’s, of global scope. There was nothing the tasteful could do about it besides grow more reticent, ‘gatekeeping’ the secrets of their favourite places tighter to save some of their self-esteem that they could keep a stamp in the collection their pests couldn’t. Somehow, to a degree, this did really work.
Better news back home was that throughout and in spite of the hobby’s distortions, the non-public section of the forum – referred to as NP – continued to flourish. Although domain renewals for many of the best personal blogs from the salad days began to ebb, Russian space launch sites aside, 28Dayslater NP was awash with leaps and bounds. One exclusively saw all the next biggest things in most genres of UK UE there first, and often nowhere else after, sailing right over the tasteless’ heads at a bearable hit rate. This was something of a family affair. Membership invitations to NP were kept in a more stringent, more meritocratic, reputational order than one might expect by its administrator, known as Ojay; a middle-aged Mancunian, veteran urban explorer and prolific drainer (who despite his position inviting inference of divisiveness is at the end of the day a very reasonable man). NP was and remains primary residence of the largest swathe of what one could call the core of the British scene, and is still head and shoulders the premier archive of its progression and achievements. The core of NP has for some time represented the spearhead of UK UE for all efforts pertinent to industrial, institutional, military and architectural heritage, and those who originate from elsewhere in the scene, carry with them a basic level of intelligence and pleasant demeanour, and who are inclined towards a certain standard and ambition in their work always seem to diffuse into this circle before too long. Many such cases. As for scale, the count of persons privy to NP and of relevant individuals who have left a notably positive mark, however small, on UK UE in the last twenty years is, finger in the air, about three-hundred. Therein, the lion’s share of strides forward for UK UE can be summarised by looking at two archetype individuals.
First-rate pieces of exploring and accompanying reportage on new-to-UE locations tend to come from people in bursts, brief and bright; once a month for half a year, once every few months for a few years, this kind of rate. For devoted fieldwork, toiling depleting orchards for a slimmer and slimmer chance of bearing juicy and fresh fruit – this requires a lot of time, a lot of mileage, a lot of unwavering drive. A sustained output of must-read, important 28Dayslater reportage like this for more than a few years is therefore uncommon. People bore, run out of steam, patience, lose their touch for what to look out for, find their spirit of tenuous expedition flees from them. Two decades worth of it? That’s a career without equal.
Speed (his long-time online ALIAS) remembers Christmas Eve 2004 like a wedding anniversary. He reminisces: “Eighteen, just out of school with a new driver’s licence, and looking for something captivating in life.” He’d “been browsing Simon Cornwell’s blog for some months, and become hooked on this derelict building idea.” Despite finding it a frightening prospect, as is natural to the young newcomer yet unaccustomed to serial autonomous delinquency, he “finally decided to drive to the nearest derelict hospital” (of which there were dozens around Britain in 2004), “and let adrenaline take over at the fence.” So began what was to be the richest individual body of work in plotting epic on this island’s map to date.
Speed’s paradigm is one underscored by documentation, and exploration in a literal sense. This, he reckons, is one of the only motives which ought hold up. He has no problem in certifying the act of trespass as being tautologically a reason for upset, and so deems the cause to create a quality record of premises which would be lost to the void of the past amongst its only comfortable justifications. A potential window into a different time bowing out to the bulldozer without the urban explorer charting its offerings is for Speed a great shame, a missed opportunity. Even if it turned out to be a Potemkin village, someone should at least double check. With that said, there is not necessarily some great communal archaeology project going on for him, and he does not downplay the significance of the egocentric tailored experience. He is in no particular pigeonhole, happy to mooch without care or to be thrown into the thick of stressful action if one or the other is the right bet; his memory of somewhere, he implies, can often be dominated by the day itself, less so the place. Accounting these traits, an artefact such as the Wilton Terylene factory, for instance, when all the other big derelict buildings were already in the books, is a textbook Speed uncovering.
Speed’s chosen register and medium of communication about his work is the forum – little else. He puts the pride of his accomplishments for posterity in no other cache, onto no other market. Shy on the subject when asked, he seems unenthused by the idea of a printed literary snapshot of his portfolio, or even a personal digital gallery as has long been a standard indulgence for vanguard UE figures. This is a show of staying true to roots, mind, as SP is one of only a few still central to today’s scene who came up in time to participate in the late noughties’ golden age, in the forum’s arms; for which anyone’s nostalgia would be rosily fond.
Over the last twenty years, he notes cyclical lulls and frenzies for the scene – periods of abundance and scarcity of fresh epic in waves. His consensus for the future of the hobby is one of a general decline in the joys that what’s out there can harbour for the tasteful explorer, that scarcity will prevail, but he is far from writing off there being anything really good left to turn over hiding somewhere or another. And if anyone would know, here is the man. A mechanical engineer, SP has long understood the array of endangered industries, amongst everything else, which weaves the increasingly threadbare quilt of yesterday’s Britain, forever expertly acquainted with such items as which manufacturing workshop tipped to close in the near future holds promise of quality to the urban explorer and which does not, for instance. To educate Speed on UK UE is to take coals to Newcastle.
A stringbean frame and boyish face with puffy cheeks upon which usually rest rectangular spectacles, Speed is perfectly approachable, speaking softly and patiently, though prefers to keep slim company. Whilst reserved in person, he is famously vocal on the forum beyond his reportage, often in blunt pronouncement. His eye is so trained by such experience that he is firmly opinionated on what he sees brought to the table and how UE ought be done; seldom impressed, especially by what he perceives as ‘tourism’ – mass descent on ‘flavour of the month’ locations – and will not half let them know what he thinks of it. In tandem, he takes great stock in being the hand that feeds; ‘the first’ to find or properly document somewhere epic abounds.
On the topic of epic: actually, epic is a term of his coinage. I have totally stolen it and repurposed it. Although when SP talks about epic, he is not talking about romance, exoticism or spectacle. Rather, he is talking about antiques. For SP is one of several in UE who have also grown a great passion alongside it for collecting would-be discarded wares, nick-knacks and souvenirs through it. Indeed his home in Birmingham, where he has lived since leaving his home county of Suffolk for university, resembles a melange of a hundred kinds of collector’s museums.
As the carcass of last century’s structural Britain was acquainting itself with this most prolific pair of eyes, the questioning of just how malleable the practice of recreational trespass could potentially be – of just how far along the ends to which it could be deployed on this island lay – remained ongoing. This matter first met with who was to be its most brutal interrogator in 2011, somewhere on the moors of West Yorkshire in a baggy old windbreaker and pair of waterproof trousers. Below a scruffy head of ginger hair stretched the beaming grin of a kid stumbled into a sweet shop.
“I’ll just get a parasitic idea in my head,” Fishbrain (only ALIAS of choice) explains, “and every time I drive past something I once thought about but haven’t been in or atop of, I’ll get this itch. Like a rat I need to stamp, or it’ll become an eternal irritation.” Fishbrain doesn’t mind spreading himself thin. It seems to be a basic need, actually. His hinterland is as vast and diverse as full time employment and a family man’s dedications will allow. And then some. He is both a classical outdoorsman and a bookworm; both a Yosemite-calibre rock climber and skilled coder. He has played in a local metal band whilst being an authority on various types of hardcore techno music; he would feel as much at ease on a University Challenge panel as in a room full of freaks from society’s underbelly.
In the middle of this wide net he casts, it was UE for which he fell head over heels. As has always been unusual in UK UE, Fishbrain came onto the scene as part of a crew; a group of friends out of Manchester nicknaming themselves SNC. Fishbrain and co took their baby steps as most of us did, sure; they visited a derelict such-and-such with their Nikons slung round their necks, enjoyed their day out, brainstormed how best to do it again. Then, amidst the brainstorming, Fishbrain had a seminal idea. “That was easy”, he thought. “And fun, of course! But what if – right – we also deliberately make it, like, really hard?”
As first among equals in SNC, Fishbrain set about blending a vision of UE in equal measure both a jet-set, gregarious, fringe lifestyle and a series of bold, targeted, calculated and downright difficult problem-solving projects. Gallivanter or special operations technician for that week, the denominator was passionate application. This ‘itchiness’. No sooner could he be found sleeping three hours a night on a roll mat in a squat for a city break’s capering on the weekend than studying the precise dimensions of various strange structures and nodes around Manchester for several weeknights in a row.
It was in this way that Fishbrain’s account with UE burst into bloom. Immersing himself in any available visual and reading material, he was captivated by an array of the time’s international goings-on online, and strove to make contact at every opportunity. Manchester airport became a second home. Bubbly, genuine and with time for everyone, he was quickly penned onto the guest list of every lads’ holiday, every big bash of core scenes from Kiev to Melbourne, Minneapolis to Antwerp. With this network, the borderless world of early 2010s rough-and-tumble UE hijinks was on a platter early doors.
Simultaneously back home, his interrogation of the full potential of technical trespass practice on British soil was working up a sweat. To somewhere lying in plain sight appealing to only the wildest margins of the trespasser’s imagination which had not yet been infiltrated on record he asked: “why not?” To a response of it being too much of an undertaking or a consensus of there being no feasible way to proceed with such an objective, he sought to see about that for himself. At first specialising in the non-derelict – building sites, operational sites, vantage points, drains, railways, subterranean infrastructure and so forth – SNC rattled off handfuls of swashbuckling exploits with approaches to UE the rest of the scene had yet to get used to. In many arenas they simply made up their own name of the game, had no peers.
For some years, peaking in 2014 and 2015, this energy was indefatigable, and the results serially bar-raising. “He just lands on his feet, him” – childhood friend and SNC colleague Tweek chimes in for succinct summary. Beyond taking centre stage in bringing unconventional techniques like key card cloning or outside-the-box uses of rope into the more standardised British playbook, crucially, Fishbrain stepped forward as the UK UE’s chief canary in the mineshaft vis-à-vis tackling specifications of fence and types of serious functional site the feathers of which had not dared been ruffled in this inquisitive capacity before. And the rest of the core scene got to know all about it thanks to a nice coincidence: Fishbrain happens to be one of its only avid authors.
Fishbrain was sadder than anyone to see the decline of the personal, storyteller’s blog as a cornerstone of UE culture not so long after SNC hit their stride. So he took it upon himself to revive the custom, and over a decade down the line, there remains no surviving deposit of UE blog-writing as striking as his domain at testchamber.net. Reportage for 28dayslater was duly provided alongside in appropriate public visibility: using suction cups to overcome a protruding deck and complete a roped climb of Blackpool tower under darkness could inspire any internet surfer, whilst fixing a zipline between two office block roofs to access an air shaft for critical subterranean infrastructure had to be just for the NP clique – and so on. He puts a lot of the action man character into these tales when it comes to the business of accomplishment. A catch-me-if-you-can, chancer’s mystique. But don’t be fooled. There is always method. A lot of it. One cannot do this at this kind of level successfully with entitlement, without being punctilious and prudent, without careful technical fluency. Regardless of his ‘itch’, he is “always happy to walk away if it doesn’t look quite right.”
Mmm. That’s the deal at UE’s sharp end: only one decision out of a thousand to not walk away at the right moment can flip the script for a while. After years of stretching the confines of UE to their most elastic, evading innumerable comically close shaves with serious trouble in doing so, one eventual error in judgement gave an especially bothersome strain of it a moment to snare him towards the end of the 2010s. This was not in Britain, either, rather abroad – and neither in some grisly ex-Soviet or third world backdrop, but in a country famous for its liberalism and soft touch, of all places. But that’s his story to tell. And if you’re curious you might be in luck – Fishbrain is the author of what will soon be the next pucker paperback on the UE subject since, well, round about never. His working title is Evidence.
At the end of the day, albeit seldom partners in crime together, Speed and Fishbrain find the starkest common ground in both wanting to inspire a higher class of urban explorer.
razorwire.rip 