I am an urban explorer. I am enticed by what is behind the functioning façade of striated city space. Beyond the liminal zone of black hoarding that surrounds a derelict factory like a wagon circle, secrets reside. When the sun goes down and the city goes to sleep, I might crawl into those places quietly, taking some pictures, shooting some video, scribbling some thoughts, sitting in silence; capturing little pieces of utopia, writing myself into these hidden histories as I watch their materiality mutate slowly like a rock moving through soil, assisted by the foliage we thought we had eradicated from the clean streets out there. Little green shoots crumble brick. In fact, this is what entices me about every city, every place where humans once resided – what was left behind and forgotten; what can be experienced; which transmutations can be anticipated. There is no one here to arrest this decay; no one to tell me how it should make me feel. My research is a visual ethnography of urban exploration, a practice which involves the exploration of derelict industrial space. This paper is about what one might find in those places.

1. “I Think it’s Unlocked” – Exploring Remnants of Industry Bradley L. Garrett Royal Holloway, University of London

2. “An interior tourism that allows the curious-minded to discover a world of behind-the-scenes sights”(Ninjalicious 2005).

3. “Waste products of a functionalist administration” (De Certeau 1984).

4. “Unstable, fetid and lukewarm substances where life ferments ignobly” (Bataille 1993).

5. “The production of spaces of ruination and dereliction are an inevitable result of capitalistic development and the relentless search for profit” (Edensor 2005).

6. “Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs”(Smithson 1967).

10. “When it is not crawling, climbing, and falling, urban exploration is principally ambulatory” (Genosko 2009).

16. “The world of gesture and habit, traditional skill and unstudied reflex” (Nora 1989).

17. “I feel that it is the garbage, the very dirt where important papers and simple scraps are mixed and unsorted, that comprises the only real fabric of my life” (Benjamin 1999).

18. “Derelict factories are vast centres for exploration containing lengthy corridors to run along, stairs to scamper up, windows to climb through, trap doors, pulleys and channels to negotiate” (Edensor 2005).

20. “The repeated action of putting one foot in front of the other necessitates contact with the ground and, often, a state of being attuned with the environment” (Lee and Ingold 2006 ).

21. Still from the 2005 film Sahara @ the “Stargate”.

22. “Breton: ‘For myself, I admit such steps are everything. Where do they lead, that is the real question.’…Nadja: ‘Lost Steps? But there’s no such thing!’” (Breton 1960).