As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Produced by Otter

Without contraries, there is no progression.
– William Blake

Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.
– The Coming Insurrection

Implosion

A lot of ink is spilled over urban exploration’s relationship to the past and I have previously written about how the anticipated transience of places, the act of bearing witness to their inevitable death, adds to our experience of exploring them in the present. These geographic imaginations of unrealized temporal iterations positively reinforce our notions of place in the world, giving us a sense of agency as we realise that in the midst of all of the endless death and decay, we live, even as we are reminded our time here is limited. This notion has guided historical attractions to ruination for centuries, stretching back to ancient Rome when Livy explored the Cloaca Maxima sewer. The nostalgic lust for derelict and crumbling spaces has never left us for as Alan Rapp writes ‘the metaphorical power of ruination is as relevant today as it was in an ostensibly more Romantic era’. Our love for things of the past, the nostalgia that Nietzsche found so crippling, is described by G.M. Trevelian who writes:

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone…

The nature of Post

Ruins, like dreams, pull us, in one direction, toward our innermost yearnings and, in another, towards a life beyond the constraints of the real; the romantic accounts of ruin exploration in the last 2000 years abound. But clearly part of our attraction to derelict space also has a darker component of an imagined ruined future that has not been written about nearly as much, a Ballardian formulation of urban apocalypse.

Crumble

Recently, Paul Dobraszczyk wrote a wonderful paper in the journal City where he describes his trip the to exploded nuclear reactor at Chernobyl which ‘incorporated elements of both dark tourism and urban exploration’ as he searched for what Susan Sontag referred to confrontations with ‘inconceivable terror’. Just a few years previous, Tom Vanderbilt penned the book Survival City in which he explores the ruins of atomic America and in the new book Ruins of Modernity (my review in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space forthcoming), Jonathan Veitch tours the Nevada Atomic Test Site where he finds not the expected response of melancholy or nostalgia upon entering the ruins but Baudelaire’s Satanic laughter, a terror that is so visceral the only possible response humour, as if the emotions have been short-wired by the horror.

People as numbers

And so we come to the thesis. Part of the reason we enjoy exploring decaying architecture is rooted in an imagination of a post-apocalyptic future. These places are viscerally enticing in their wretchedness, in part, because imagining ourselves in a future where we populate them during imagined use-lives filled with heroism and adventure is so improbable that it forces one to meditate on the surreal nature of the past that had led us to this most improbable junction in time. Writing of Pripyat, one contributor to the new book Beauty in Decay which represents these sites with burning gothic intensity notes the Pripyat “continues to whisper of a ‘post-human’ earth which, in the end, may be the strongest fascination of them all.”

More than human?

In our explorations of the ruins of Eastern Europe this past summer, we all took guilty pleasure in witnessing the remains of the failed Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, reacting, at times, absurdly to it. The experience left us in a distinctly different state than ruin exploration in the United Kingdom, the reverence for actual state failure (rather than imagined post-capitalist or “site-specific” failure) making our explorations both more poignant and more guilt-ridden.

Our former 'enemies'

Invoked

By a history

Never witnessed

But felt

If, as Dylan Trigg writes in The Aesthetics of Decay, a derelict factory testifies to a failed past but also reminds us that the future may end in ruin, what does the ruin of a failed state say to us?

Get on, I guess

Henry James writes in Italian Hours that “to delight in the aspect of the sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows a note of perversity”. This perversity takes on a different form as you leave “home”, the nostalgia wears a dark mask of exotic fetishism that beckons the days of Empire even as we participate in the beginnings of the failure of capitalism and the nation state at home. Of course, these expeditions are markedly less decadent than those of ages past but even speaking English marks us as a potentially dark and exploitative party even as we seek to avoid being “tourists” by following Steve Pile’s advice that in order to get at some of the real (really operative) processes in city life, attention should be paid to those things that appear marginal, or discarded, or lost, or that have disappeared or are in the process of disappearance.

A rapidly depleting resource

A year ago, we took a trip out to the Mojave Desert in California for a friend’s bachelor party. Our intention was to explore the Calico Mines under the ghost town. Which we did, finding all sort of mysterious chambers, boxes of dynamite, uninvited spectres and endless subterranean playgrounds. But always in the back of our minds, there was a fantasy playing out of someday taking refuge here. Whether that was from drought, famine, nuclear attack or a zombie infestation was never articulated but we all knew it was implied. We were collecting derelict site locations as a post-apocalypse insurance policy. As Susan Buck-Morss wrote in The Dialectics of Seeing, throughout Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the image of the “ruin”, is emblematic not only of the transitoriness and fragility of capitalist culture, but also its destructiveness. Our imaginations were all bolstered by the thought we were seeing ghosts from a future yet to come.

Indeed, as Hell and Schönle write in Ruins of Modernity, ruin exploration can involve “reflections about history: about the nature of the event, the meaning of the past for the present, that nature of history itself as eternal cycle, progress, apocalypse, or murderous dialectic process.” These inevitable intersections took grip firmly as we were leaving the mines. On the way out, we were confronted by survivalists from a militia who had dug into the caves to create desert shelters and were patrolling their territory in a weaponised 4×4 buggy. The father was clearly ex-military, barking orders at his kid to “get on the gun, son” for a photo op. As they sped away, they yelled back at us that the government was collapsing and we would do best to prepare to defend some territory, a new tribalism, they insisted, was on its way.

Apocalypse

These post-apocalyptic imaginaries are evident all over popular culture, from films like Mad Max, 28 Days Later, 12 Monkeys or Blade Runner, in books like After London, The World Made by Hand, The Road, The Stand, or The Plague and even in video games like Bioshock and Silent Hill. In all of these depictions, though the future may be bleak and dytopic, there is some underlying euphoria behind the freedom that comes with being released from the state, social life and cultural expectation that has an obvious relationship to the off-the-grid spaces that urban explorers go into. I have to wonder though, as we run into more and more people living this way now (primarily squatters and unsanctioned parties) rather than imagining to live this way in some distant future, what it takes to drive one off the grid like the Dad and son I met in the desert.

Hiding place

For thousands

Of disaffected

It seems to me that the imaginations of these distopic futures become increasingly realistic as our faith in the state to take care of us is eroded; as we see the world collapsing around us politically, environmentally and socially. Now that may be obvious. What isn’t obvious, what no one wants to say, is that we like the idea to some extent. In some part of all of us, we want the society of the spectacle to implode, to see how we would fare in a world not regulated by health and safety, to see what we might achieve when confronted with the most basic challenges of finding food, water and shelter.

Contamination

I argue that the interest in post-apocalyptic futures in nothing less than an interest in trying to get back to what we have lost in late capitalism, a sense of place, a sense of community, a sense of self. And although urban exploration passes through places rather than staking them out in any permanent way, urban exploration as a movement is a vital bridge, a gateway, because it finally makes to move from the imagined to the physical. When we explore, we take a step off the grid. It is only one more step to stay off it.

Always almost on the brink

With Ruins
Li-Young Lee

Choose a quiet place, a ruin,
a house no more a house,
under whose stone archway I stood
one day to duck the rain.

The roofless floor, vertical
studs, eight wood columns
supporting nothing,
two staircases careening to nowhere,
all make it seem

a sketch, notes to a house, a three-
dimensional grid negotiating
absences, an idea
receding into indefinite rain,

or else that idea
emerging, skeletal
against the hammered sky, a
human thing, scoured seen clean
through from here to an iron heaven.

A place where things
were said and done,
there you can remember
what you need to remember.
Melancholy is useful. Bring yours.

There are no neighbors to wonder
who you are,
what you might me doing
walking there,
stopping now and then

to touch a crumbling brick
or stand in a doorway
framed by the day.
No one has to know you
thing of another doorway

that framed the rain or news of war
depending on which way you faced.
You think of sea-roads and earth-roads
you traveled once, and always
in the same direction: away.

You think
of a woman, a favorite
dress, your old father’s breasts
the last time you saw him, his breath,
brief, the leaf

you’ve torn from a vine and which you hold now
to your cheek like a train ticket
or a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade –
it all depends
on the course of your memory.

It’s a place
for those who own no place
to correspond to ruins in the soul.
It’s mine.
It’s all yours.

___________________

For Toby Butler

Malo Periculosam Libertatem Quam Quietum Servitium
-Rousseau, On The Social Contract

War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms
-Machiavelli

Enough is

Enough

I was there on the front lines. I was proud to be there. The protests that took place on Wednesday in Central London were not the pinnacle of a movement but the tip of the iceberg. These protests, which I long predicted would turn violent, were a reasonable reaction from a populace that has been consistently victimised by the current administration. The smashing of public property at the Conservative Party headquarters was a balanced reaction to an administration who would rather cut funding for healthcare and education than for pork-barrel government projects and unjust wars waged abroad in our name.

Government officials who rob the poor to create wealth for the rich deserve to be chased from their workplace and inconvenienced for a few days. For what have been gained through non-violent means? Likely not even a public statement from Boris Johnson or David Cameron, which, insulting as those comments were (basically they told us “fuck you”, we’ll do what we want), at least made it clear we got their attention.

You are lucky we didn’t turn your party headquarters into a new social centre Cameron. Like it or not, this is what democracy looks like. This is not your government, these are not your streets, they are ours.

Articulation

Participation

Organisation

Risk

Comes before

Response

The media responses have been both positive and negative, though mostly sympathetic. One story that stands out in particular is the praise coming from lecturers at Goldsmith University for the protests who signed a statement saying “We the undersigned wish to congratulate staff and students on the magnificent anti-cuts demonstration this afternoon. We wish to condemn and distance ourselves from the from the divisive and, in our view, counterproductive statements issued by NUS and [national] UCU concerning the occupation of the Conservative Party HQ. The real violence in this situation relates not to a smashed window but to the destructive impact of the cuts.” The Millbank House occupation apparently included the particpation of one of the lecturers, Luke Cooper, as an organiser on the front lines. Royal Holloway bows to Luke Cooper and Goldsmiths – thank you for your support.

By the end of the night, I was kettled in the street as I waited for a friend to show up from Manchester to lend his support. I was “stop and searched” under Section 60 of the UK Terrorism Act, a search which was ill-timed and badly carried out, despite the levity with which most officers carried it out.

Kettled by

Reasonable

And unreasonable cops

So what happens now? Well, as I said, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Look forward to walk-outs on November 24th. Unfortunately I will be away at a workshop that week in Dundee, but I trust you all will keep this fire burning.

This isn't over

Beauty is a thing of might and dread. Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.
-Kahlil Gibran

Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination.
-Swami Sivananda

Ecstasy

Certain sites of urban exploration are to be tasted, others swallowed and some to be chewed and digested. I have had a love affair with Battersea Power Station, my Dark Princess, since arriving in London. The first time I rode past on the train and saw her crumbing dark brick and creamy smokestacks shining in the afternoon light, I began to feel a powerful desire to get closer. Slowly, over the course of 2 years, I have gone back to her over and over again, on foot, crawling through tunnels, by boat. I have visited her on lonely late nights of contemplation, seeking advice and solace, in the evenings, in the days, through changes of ownership and constantly changing security measures, running around the control rooms playing hide and seek and laying along the chimneys with friends in London’s early dawn light waiting for the ecstasy of her grandeur to eventually fade, which it never does. I feel that we have, over the years, developed a complicated and passionate relationship to the point that I defend her liminal status as being the best place for her to reside. I want her just as she is, now and forever.

No man's land

With intention

Last year, a plan was hatched to watch the city’s firework display from Battersea Park via the chimneys of my Dark Princess. Ironically, because of all of the traffic coming to Clapham Common where I live for the epic yearly display here, I couldn’t get there in time. I have regretted it ever since, determined to let nothing stop me this year from attending what has become a sacred urban explorer pilgrimage.

Security is part of the game. They know we are coming. They know we won’t give up spending this night with the Dark Princess. Last night, the place was swarming with workers and patrols, a large tent in the middle shooting blue lights onto the interior walls as we slipped up the scaffolding. The tremors of fear and roaming floodlights only added to the passion of the affair. In the end, 7 of us made it in even as others were caught in the yard below with screams and footchases we could hear while hanging from the steel girders.

And for our persistence, the Dark Princess rewarded us with the most spectacular beauty imaginable, aided in no small part the worker’s light show they unintentionally put on for us (thank you workers!).

Rekindled

The night

For 30 minutes, we sunk into the bliss of a successful pilgrimage, eyes closed with the sky flaring behind our eyelids, one terrible rumble after another awaking our primal imaginaries, drifting into the night. The evening turned into a fervour of laughter and play as we ran into the city to wreak more havoc in our intoxication of passion. I let the night go with a heavy heart.

In revelry

The whole universe will glow