Secrets of an UrbEx mission

Richard Godwin
15 Mar 2010

It is shortly after dawn on a bitterly cold Sunday morning and I am skulking around the grounds of an abandoned lunatic asylum, trying to find a way in. My accomplices are a 15-year-old boy, Scott Cadman, an obsessive photographer and Urban Explorer, whose remarkable pictures illustrate these pages, and his father, Simon, a lecturer and radio producer.

Other parents take their kids to tennis clubs and ballet lessons. Simon regularly rises at 5am and drives his son from the family home in Crouch End to condemned municipal buildings and abandoned factories all over London — places sometimes frequented by junkies and arsonists. He watches proudly as Scott documents ruin, abandonment and decay with his Canon 1000d. I have the distinct sense, as Simon searches for breaches in the building's rotting outer walls, that he rather enjoys his son's hobby.

It is a beautiful morning, all fresh-skied and blue. We have already negotiated the riskiest part in getting into the grounds of the asylum at all, through a path in the trees. Many UrbExers fail here, Scott says — hence our arriving so early, to catch the security guards unaware.

“Just to be clear,” he told me in an email beforehand, “Urban Exploration involves trespassing. This does sound slightly daunting. But we take pride in not stealing, not breaking anything and leaving no trace that we were ever there.” For all his sense of adventure, he is surprisingly conscientious.

Scott makes me promise not to name the asylum, to deter the site's present owner, a housing developer, from ramping up security. But I can say it is in south London and it is huge, with numerous outbuildings and wards, all connected by a network of corridors. Opened in 1923, it was run by the London County Council and housed more than 2,000 men and women at its height, from epileptics to psychotics. It had its own water tower and a vast ballroom at its centre (Lord knows what kind of balls they had) while a narrow-gauge railway connected it to other asylums in the area.

By the 1990s, care in the community had become the preferred (and cheaper) method of dealing with the mentally ill and the place was abandoned but for a tiny wing, which remains in use. Its scale, around 40 acres, plus the fact that much of the original equipment was left in it, make it a magnet for Urban Explorers from across Europe.
Scott and Simon have been down here three times before and know the best way in — but the loose board that they slipped past two weeks ago has been nailed back on. Scott suspects the hand of MC Hammer, a security guard so christened by UrbExers for his enthusiasm for nailing all entrances shut. “Don't worry,” whispers Simon, “there's always a way in.”

Sure enough, we eventually find a loose panel in the interconnecting corridor, which we are able to bend back and squeeze through. At last, the adventure begins.

Hospitals, schools and factories are preferred sites for UrbEx. Scott has documented the Olympic site, Canary Wharf and numerous goods yards. But he particularly values asylums, for their architecture, their history, the stories they evoke.

This is a living theatre, vast as a nightmare. Abstract artists have forged entire careers replicating effects like the peeling paint on the walls. The Arts Council gives thousands of pounds in grants to experimental theatre companies who aim for a fraction of the drama of its corridors. Production designers would struggle to make a scene as memorable as the pale green ward where ghostly plastic curtains hang from the ceiling and an old-fashioned wheelchair stands on the sagging floor.

Scott sets up his tripod. I watch as he diligently takes and erases photos, adjusting the aperture for the perfect exposure. Finally, he finds the configuration that lets the brittle morning light suffuse the scene sufficiently. Click click click. Later, I learn the wheelchair has been placed there by another UrbExer; the floor sags because Simon once nearly fell through the rotting boards.

On we wander. There are many grim toilet blocks, sad baths, a corridor of cells attacked by arsonists, their paint bubbly and charred. A cheery tuck shop, perhaps for visiting relatives, stands at the end of a corridor of offices filled with enigmatic paperwork. A vast, industrial space we guess was the laundry contains a conveyor belt.

I pick up a scrawled note: “It's not fair on Chantelle you just coming and going when it pleases you, all day today, she kept on saying daddy's gone, and when I said you was at work she said no, daddy's gone.” Scott wanted to show me the padded cell but it is apparently unreachable now, thanks again to MC Hammer.

Everywhere, Scott trains his camera — crouching to get a close-up of a smashed cash register, switching to a wide-angle lens to take in the burnt-out ballroom, spotting angles which I only appreciate later, through his photos. Simon has his own camera, too. “I don't really know what I'm doing — I just try to learn from Scott,” he says.

For his part, Scott says he inherited his eye from his mother, also a lecturer in journalism — but the UrbExing is instinctive. “I have always enjoyed roaming the streets of London, right from when I was very young, as there are small details that you only ever see if you are half lost,” he explains. He pools knowledge about sites and security guards with other explorers (most far older than him) on the forum at www.28dayslater.co.uk, and takes tips from fellow photographers on Flickr. UrbExing appeals to the part of us that craves tangible, physical experience, away from the digital world, yet it is the internet that has allowed it to flourish.

We are caught eventually — just as I am beginning to worry about asbestos. “You, come here,” says a voice. We obey, walking slowly toward a security guard in a hi-vis jacket. He looks frightened.

“Why do you come here?” he says. “It is dangerous for you. You don't know what kind of people you might find here.” Are we in fact in some apocalyptic zombie movie? I realise, in the four hours we have been here, I have totally lost track of reality.

The guard tells us that, since we had cameras, we have a vague premise for being there so he isn't going to call the police (he can't anyway, Scott says later, being well acquainted with trespass law). We are walked off the site. On the way, the guard confesses that every time he enters the asylum, he says a prayer.

Back at Simon's car, we share a Thermos of coffee and readjust to the awakening world. “It takes a while to come back down,” says Simon.

For Scott, it is back to school, where he can dream of the next explore. “I've just begun the GCSE process, and am loathing it more and more,” he says to me in an email later. “Nevertheless, it is important for me to get high grades to make a good sixth-form college and then university. That's the part I'm looking forward to most — lots of photography facilities to use!”

Now there's a kid with his head screwed on.

To see more of Scott Cadman's photography, go to www.flickr.com/photos/berngraffiti

WHAT IS URBEX?
Urban Exploration is the art of gaining access to parts of the city that are off-limits, including catacombs, tunnels, abandoned industrial sites and old municipal buildings. This often involves trespassing but rarely breaking and entering, as true UrbExers make their way in through existing breaches and frown upon vandalism and theft. If caught, they will usually be escorted from the premises without prosecution. Dangers such as rotting floors, asbestos and faulty electrics are set against the adrenaline of discovery. Most UrbExers are keen photographers, drawn to the beauty of decay and, as Scott Cadman says, “being as far away from other people as possible”.