Yesterday, I was invited by LutEx and Hydra to explore some World War II air raid shelters near London. The experience of being in shelters invoked a lot of new feelings for me, being American and never knowing what it would feel like to have your city bombed. Although we have many cold war shelters throughout the United States, these shelters were a precautionary measure, likely never to be used.

The shelters we went to yesterday, on the other hand, were inhabited by people who had left simple, isolated artifacts in these generally empty shelters, small reminders of the hidden history of this spectacularized city. A can of something evaporated, stone benches lining the walls, a few pots and pans, now surrounded by newly forming stalactites and stalagmites of minerals dripping in from the rainy city above.

Most interesting for me was Lutex’s technique for entering the shelters though manholes in the middle of the street, which he called overt camouflage. The idea basically is that is you look like you belong there, people will assume you do. I have seen similar techniques used by street artists that a fellow student at Royal Holloway, Luke Dickens, has been studying.

Lutex mystified me with his calm, organized and rational approach to the concept. He pulled his car up to the curb, coned off the area, adorned himself with a high visibility vest and proceeded to tape of the cones to keep pedestrians out and give the site the look of a public project. He then produced two keys which we fit into the manhole, lifted it up and voila! 60 years of history is ours to experience.

I am interested in other ways overt camouflage could be used but also had another thought about this idea. Basically, this only works if you have the appearance of someone who ‘belongs’ there. This means that people with body jewellery, tattoos, even dreadlocks would become more suspect immediately.

Which leads me to suggest that the real revolutionaries may not be the kids with purple mohawks, but the people who look quite normal but work to resist the complacency of modernity in their thoughts, word and actions in very subtle ways.

Here is the video from the explore (a little present for LutEx and Hydra):

Yesterday I went for an explore with four from London. Our destination was the West Park Asylum, part of a ring of asylums around London which were at one time run by the NHS (National Health System I think). Apparently Margaret Thatcher decided these places were better off either

1. Shut down or

2. Privatized

As a result, many of the workers and patients walked away from these places leaving everything in perfect order, just as it was when the asylum was up and running. What happened next, some of the explores tell me, many of these places are not seen as worth preserving because either

1. They are two ‘new’ to be of historic value or

2. The land is simply needed for something else on this little island

Because of this, the explorers take it upon themselves to record this history, and the slow decay of these places with their cameras. Despite this, many are seen as criminals, ‘trespassing’ on this recently privatized land.

When we arrived at West Park, we quietly walked in over a broken fence, and walked around the bushes keeping an eye out for the single security guard that patrols the area. Not seeing him, we proceeded to slip into the service shaft under the building. Unfortunately, our man magically appears after only one of the four of us get in and we are escorted out.

On to plan B. We headed over the St. Ebba’s and strangely, given what had just taken place, parked in the parking lot and walked in. Although part of this hospital is still ‘live’ (meaning patients still roam the grounds) they did not seem to mind, nor did the nurses who probably had personal histories in the derelict buildings on the property and were quite aware that we were going in the archive them, in a sense.

Turns out, it was a good thing we arrived when we did because demolition has begun and half of this beautiful derelict hospital in now gone.

On to the next explore…

August 1st. That was the day I began working on pulling together my ethnography. I took 6 1/2 months to pull together my fieldwork. By anthropology’s standards, I guess it is not bad but if this was simply a documentary I would have shot myself in the foot.

So, the good news is that this past weekend, two new friends took me to four mysterious abandoned places in Gillingham, Kent. Vanishing Days and Solar Powered we extremely generous, articulate and helpful, driving me back and forth from Napoleonic-era stone forts to World War II gun turrets to an equestrian center abandoned in 1986. It was a surreal day (as it usually is behind the camera) with this added affectation that desolate places tend to have.

I also find, the more that I explore, is that the more intact a place is, and the more recently is was abandoned, the more eerie it is. Perhaps it is easier to connect with the history of those places when you imagine the people who lived their still roaming the earth and reminiscing about the places that you are watching sink into the earth for some future archaeologist to uncover.

This weekend I will be headed to an abandoned asylum with my second group of informants. More to come.

Now back to editing these three hours of derelict beauty!

Well, I have officially started pulling together my research for my first enthnographic interviews. I am trying to arrange to go film groups of urban explorers and infiltrators in London.

Unfortunately, this has been more difficult than I planned. Turns out that people who are trespassing as a hobby don’t really want to be filmed and/or interviewed. Makes life a little more difficult, but it is all good data on the practicality of doing ethnography and the difficulties of using video for research.

As of now, I am trying to post of 4 different Urban Exploration facebook groups, on a website called UER (where people were incredibly rude/incredulous/suspicious), on urbexforums and on 28 Days Later, all of which require months as a member before you are ‘trusted’ (which I guess means I have to prove I am not ‘the man’).

So much for jumping right into my research – I guess its back to reading Lefevre.