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Friday 26 September 2014

Phlegm, Sheffield - September 2014

A trip up to Sheffield to visit The Festival of the Mind, to be honest it didn't float my boat, but I simply needed an excuse to go for a drive over to Yorkshire for a mooch.

Before I went for a street art mooch I did pop in to the Castle House exhibition for a butchers at the art by Phlegm, I love this chaps art.

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A few shots of Phlegm and I was out into Sheffield for a blind mooch.

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Phlegm

Phlegm

Time for the streets....



Monday 15 September 2014

St Pauls Church, Denholme - September 2014

A trip out across the border to Yorkshire with Judderman for some early morning Sunday worship, welcome to the Church of Derp !

Sadly this is not the only derelict church in England, but it was described as "shocking" back in 2012 by local paper Telegraph and Argus, we can now update that as f**cking shocking.

Once again another listed building sits unwanted and rotting, originally built back in 1846 and finally closing in September 1999, the Church of England stripped out the stained glass windows and sold them prior to the building being sold.

2014 and the only congregation it holds is pigeons.
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A small tight stone spiral staircase takes you up to the bell tower, we could have higher, but a hole in the floor with an enormous drop was rather off putting, would take a more braver explorer than ourselves.
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We both rather liked this place, a nice chilled mooch, not much to see but rather photogenic.

8/10 derptastic 





Saturday 13 September 2014

Manchester Northern Quarter - September 2014

Not been to Manchester in what seems like ages, so a welcome return to the Manchester Northern Quarter.

Despite the increasing rapid sanitisation of Manchester a gentle walk around the Northern Quarter still holds a mystical charm for me with memories of my early morning walks to work back in 1987.

Scuttling thru the back streets looking for artwork off I go down one really shitty back street, this just opens questions....  Plaster casts of dogs ? porn? or perhaps the next Lassie ? what kind of porn? the mind does boggle or mine does a little bit.

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So on with the mooch

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Wile E Coyote

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And on to my old stomping ground of Stevenson Square, for the Outhouse Project.

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Currently sporting a work from a local artist who's a favourite of mine, Akse P19.

Akse P19

Akse P19

Plenty more on my Flickr, until next time.

Urbex News - Feb to April 2014

Well we have a bit of catching up to do on the old news front, so hopefully we have a few little nuggets you may have missed.

Oh, this post has been sat in the draft folder for months and thus is not really news at all.

First off totally un-urbex, breaking my rule of posting news items from Daily Mail we have the tale of my pilot friend and his flight to Canada in a microlight.

- Clearly bonkers, he won The Britannia Trophy 2013, for excellence in aviation, presented by Prince Andrew and given this post has been kicking around so long in draft format you can now even buy the book.

First off we head to the Telegraph and explorers head to the top of the 'Walkie Talkie' building in London, not being one for dizzy heights myself - urrrrk !

As we watched the early stages of the Ukrainian troubles, this is one of the better articles on
Mr Yanukovych's pleasure palace, from The New York Times.

Ken Fager features in this article at Newscom.au  - warning folks contains HDR.

Oleg Mastruko features at Smithsonian, we are going a little highbrow in our search for derp, in this article on the world without people.

How to be an urban explorer - don't dismiss this one, I rather liked some of the pics on this one from Creative Loafing.

Now we are going a little highbrow with an article on The Economist, with an intro to urban exploration, nice pics and sound bite bollocks - strangely no mention of mills in Yorkshire full of pigeon shit.

Bloody hell, that Ken Fager chap again - a lot better pics on this one from WTVR via CNN.

Exploring the Soviet Bloc, via Gizmondo, now these photos are as good as it gets - look, look !! 


Until next time....

Tuesday 2 September 2014

Nippon No Haikyo by Jordy Meow

I was going to fly out to Japan this October for an urbex trip or as the the Japanese call it Haikyo, but for various reasons it is not going to happen in 2014 (I'm still cursing).

In the mad scramble to gather and hoard information I managed to pick up a wonderful book, nay magical book !

Remember them?  book things? Many of us urban explorers type people are hoarders of such items and this one looked very special from the moment I carefully opened the large parcel that arrived from France, a 256 page hardback of oriental exploration.

Nippon No Haikyo by Jordy Meow

That's the good stuff, down side its in French (being English I do not naturally excel at any other language other than my own selfish mother tongue and my implementation of English is shocking to be very honest). 

Secondly given Nippon No Haikyo was published in 2013 and some of the places simply don't exist anymore and finally it would seem that currently copies are are little thin on the ground. However don't let this put you off adding the book your collection as this book is a total must have with photos ranging from derp to spooky and downright spectacular.

I picked mine up from Amazon (France) and Amazon (Japan) do still have a few copies, published by Pod, the book sampler below may also have copies for sale.

So I'm currently drooling over Nara Dreamland, sad I'm not going this year but plotting an alternative destination which is going to happen this Autumn....

10/10 from me with pride of place on my ever bowing bookshelves - hunt this book down !