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The hard and fast
penetration of a gothic fortress.
Pictures from www.somethingawful.com
I've
tried to vary the following photographs enough that no one will get bored.
Yeah, that's right, I'm thinking about YOU, that's the kind of guy I am.
Now, just before I start, I want to really get it through to you how
difficult it is to get into this place. Whoever boarded it up, boarded it up
amazingly well, and they're constantly going back and re boarding it up, the
gaps they missed the first time, and the gaps made by curious explorers.
There's photos of this place boarded up on Flickr, but there's a shattered
and sloped brick wall, and the photos show a girl climbing it for access,
and now if you go there, they've (whoever it be) enveloped the brick wall
with tin paneling, and bolted it on, and welded the bolts.
They went around the bottom and blocked all the doorways with metal sheets,
which they dead bolted to the brick walls, and then spot welded, again. For
loose bricks, they pulled them and filled the spaces with mortar. They've
jammed the roller doors on the silos, and knocked out the fire escape
halfway up so there's a large gap in the wooden framework.
It's excellent work, and I give them top marks. I've been in there twice,
once at night, the other time during the day.
I broke in there by climbing a pole that was bolted to the wall, which had
been cut off with an angle grinder, but just a little too high to prevent me
from launching to the side and tucking my hands in a gap in the wall where,
I imagine, bricks had been sticking out until the fortifiers decided they
were too easy a handhold and ripped them out but forgot to mortar them.
These little gaps in the bricks and mortar dotted their way out across the
wall, a little higher each time, until they ended in a burnt corrugated iron
roof scattered with debris, the connecting room between the old style
building and the silos. Then it was a simple matter of climbing in a small
window of the silo, and I was inside.
This was not nearly as simple an operation as I made it out to be, and my
hands looked like this afterwards.
But I'm sure at this point, you're like "shut the fuck up", so I will.
When I first went in there at night, I went straight to the bottom. For my
own curiosity, but also because I like to know what's beneath me, if you can
understand the sentiment. This is underneath the silos.
And now this is the top, I hope you liked the transition.
Looking out at day.
Looking out during the night.
Looking down, towards the graffiti on the other building.
Back inside the top of the silos, the floor is dotted with circular holes a
meter in diameter, that drop straight down to the bottom of the containers,
a good 60 or 70 meter drop and they are disconcertingly numerous and
staggered in no order across the floor. But that's an aside, the picture is
of a ladder that goes straight up into a tiny machine room above the
staircase tower.
This looks like something like what a pigeon evacuates if it gets too much
gas in it's stomach and one of the sphincters, either leading to the
oesophagus or bowel blow a seal. I'm actually quite serious about this, it's
not an analogy, this is exactly what it looks like. Also, I put my hand in
it, accidentally.
And this is what a twenty year old pigeon nest looks like. The shit is, as
far as I could determine, about six inches deep.
The machinery for the elevator shaft.
The drop by the stairs.
The inside of the silo doors at the bottom of the silo, obviously.
And now I've crossed underneath to the basement of the architecturally
Gothic building next door, and will be ascending accordingly with very
little in the way of narration. Bye bye for six photos!
Hi, I'm back, this last one was taken at night, same as the one previous to
it.
Now we reach the section up the top of the building that starts to narrow.
To my surprise, at night, the floor went from metal to extremely aged and
derelict wood.
The luxury of day time.
At night, it was fearsome. There was pigeon shit in piles inches thick on
the wooden floor which was rotting through in parts and the distance
underneath me opened up into darkness, so looking through the cracks in the
timber flooring
was like looking into oblivion. What wasn't covered in pigeon shit, or
missing, or so visibly rotten that the slightest pressure would release it
into a shower of soft splinters, was covered in a thin brown-green moss as
thick and soft as carpet, and as slippery as oil. I walked on the struts
that the wood was nailed to, or I walked on the nails, hoping there was
struts underneath.. The walls were old, tightly packed varnished wood, that
as I said, were leaning in towards
me, and inset there were slatted round windows on each wall.
Carved balls decorate the staircase.
There's a little bit of a climb to the outside, as the stairs have fallen
through, as pictured, but it's simple and not at all as frightening as it
should be.
And here's the top, fenced in area.
Here it is again at night.
Looking across to the silos. The indent after the FR is where the fire
escape used to reside. Now if you look down it, there's a wooden frame that
stops, abruptly, four of five meters from the top and there's about a ten to
fifteen meter gap until the next wooden slat. Speaking as someone who has
had the absolute pleasure of climbing down a ladder in pitch darkness and
feeling for the next rung with my foot and not finding it, I find gaps in
ladders to be one of the most disconcerting sights in all the world I've
seen so far along with vicious car accidents, the confusion at the start of
a brawl and the burnt sienna sky before a dust storm.
Back down from the top of the building, there's a a bridge from silo to
Gothic structure. This disarmingly disabled looking structure is actually a
catwalk for you to strut your stuff in front of three apartments with
picture windows facing directly at you. I went across it so fast I stepped
on only two struts.
It's true.
To contact Abandoned But Not Forgotten please e-mail us at abnfco@gmail.com with any submissions you may want to contribute to the site.
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