On a mission with London's urban explorers

The Shard, the Olympic Stadium, the defunct British Museum Tube station: nowhere is off-limits for urban explorers, who consider it their right to enjoy a city from whichever height or depth they wish. Richard Godwin is the first journalist to join them on a mission
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Richard Godwin15 June 2012

Those who are serious about urban exploration are by nature discreet. Dark anoraks, lightweight trainers, tight backpacks containing climbing equipment, cameras, skeleton keys. Sensible haircuts, serious day jobs, a talent for evading CCTV cameras. The only thing that might give them away is the measured adrenaline in their step as they stake out a skyscraper, their swift sense of purpose as they test a manhole to see if it’s been left open. Another giveaway is if they allow themselves to be photographed, hanging from a crane on top of the tallest security risk in Europe, and those pictures find their way into a Sunday paper.

When Bradley L Garrett, a 31-year-old academic from California with black-framed glasses and a talent for adventure, was pictured at the top of the Shard in March, he brought the nocturnal art of urban exploration into the light. Operating in loose alliances, including Team B and the London Consolidation Crew (LCC), London’s urban explorers have already ‘infiltrated’ the Olympic Stadium, the roofs of the British Museum and St Paul’s Cathedral, the Heron Tower, all 18 abandoned London Underground stations and most other places you’ve ever wanted to snoop around, including the EastEnders set.

The Shard mission was punishing: patiently study the security guard; swing across from a bridge; shimmy along freezing scaffolding; climb 308 metres (76 storeys of stairs). But the view was worth the burning calf muscles, according to Garrett. ‘We were so high, I couldn’t see anything moving at street level,’ he wrote on his blog, placehacking.co.uk. ‘No buses, no cars, just rows of lights and train lines that looked like converging river systems, a giant urban circuit board.’ One of his mottos is ‘Act before you think’.

In Tales of Urban Exploration, his PhD thesis for the University of London, Garrett describes the practice as ‘the reassertion of power over place from a population frustrated by increasing constrictions on spatial freedom’. In a city where space is so tightly patrolled and guarded, with more CCTV cameras per head than anywhere else in the world, there is a political angle to going places you are not supposed to go. However, most of the UK’s 3,000 or so urban explorers are motivated primarily by curiosity. ‘We want to interact with London’s hidden histories and forgotten stories and places,’ he explains.

Who wouldn’t? Since the Shard pictures were published, Garrett has appeared on ITV’s Daybreak, been approached by a chef who wanted a cool venue for a secret restaurant (Garrett, who has thrown a party for 80 people inside London Bridge, which is partly hollow, said maybe); and an environmentalist who wanted help on a protest (no comment). On a recent Saturday night, I became the first journalist to join him on a mission.

We met at Old Street roundabout, shortly after 11pm. Another veteran of the Shard, Marc Explo, 30, a crop-haired Frenchman with a philosophical tone, came along, too, as did Dan Salisbury, 23, a photography student with a shifty determination in every tense step. As Hoxtonites smoked outside clubs, we headed for Eagle House, a £65 million, 27-storey development at 159 City Road. The building was supposed to be a ‘landmark for Hoxton’, according to the developer McCabe, but since the Irish speculators went bust halfway through construction, for the past couple of years it has been a half-finished monument to the financial crash. Salisbury reckoned we could get in round the back.

There was a gap of about a foot underneath the iron hoarding; I was just figuring it was too small for a man’s head, when Salisbury slid his backpack under and followed, face-first. I crawled after him, hips digging into the dirt. Urban exploring, you soon realise, is either disconcertingly easy, or disconcertingly hard. As soon as the others were in, a torch beam peeked through the half-light. Security. ‘F***,’ someone whispered. It’s amazing how quickly four men can spring over an eight-foot fence.

We walked briskly away, adrenalised. ‘This is the nature of exploring,’ explained Garrett. ‘You come out one night, the security guard will be asleep in his hut; another night, he’ll be on the ball.’ The Saturday night revellers, who earlier had seemed to own Hoxton, now appeared bleary and approximate; exploration is its own drug. Garrett told me he often climbs construction sites alone, on the way home from regular nights out. ‘Going out to the pub and hanging out with friends isn’t really enough for me any more.’ As we pulsed away, I realised two things: I was completely exhilarated; and I had torn a hole in my leather jacket.

Shortly after midnight, we arrived at the half-built Heron Tower in the City. Rejected. Too well-lit. ‘It can be done,’ said Garrett. ‘We’ll scope it out in daylight, work out where the cameras are, check for alarms. Then you come back and go straight over. You don’t hesitate.’ They wanted to take me to the Barbican Tower, which would entail ‘cubing’ the building – entering through the basement, before heading to the roof – but they hadn’t figured out the alarm system yet. After we ran into a security guard at a half-built tower in Aldgate East, too, it threatened to be an ENOF: an ‘epic night of fail’. Then I remembered an Underground site someone had mentioned we might infiltrate.

Half an hour later, we were closing a trapdoor near the north bank of the Thames, descending into the arteries of the city. The GLC pipe tunnels were bored in the 1860s, as part of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s Thames Embankment, one of the most remarkable feats of Victorian civil engineering. When Bazalgette built London’s sewers, he forecast the capital’s population in 150 years’ time, then built them to double that capacity. Today, a narrow tunnel extends from Mansion House to Westminster that houses high-voltage electricity wires (11,000 volts, I couldn’t help but notice), as well as fibre-optic cables and a gas pipe. At points, the cables closed in like tentacles as the tunnel narrowed; at others, the arrangement felt oddly domestic, like a socket containing way too many plugs. ‘Do you smell gas?’ I asked. ‘Oh yeah, these pipes always leak. Don’t light a cigarette!’ said Bradley. We paused to inspect fluorescent bugs, discarded equipment, a tiny peephole on to the District Line. Time seemed to slow down and stop.

We emerged at around 3am. Dan locked up and turned off the lights. I made my way back through the City, passing stumbling clubbers, feeling disjointed yet elated. I wanted to climb every lamp-post. Back home, it took me a couple of hours to get to sleep.

The term urban exploring (or urbex, or UE) was coined by Jeff Chapman, aka Ninjalicious, a Canadian explorer who, before his death in 2005, codified the practice in his book Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration. There are now groups all over the world, notably in Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, New York and Toronto (recently, 70-odd explorers met up in Antwerp for a party in its picturesque sewer system). The focus was initially ‘TOADS’: temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict structures, such as old hospitals and sewers. They shared photos on Flickr, and discussed missions on forums such as 28dayslater.co.uk. But the inner circle have ‘sort of stepped it up since then,’ says Garrett.

He describes 2008 to 2011 as a Golden Age of exploration. The recession had left insecure structures such as Eagle House all over town; cost-cutting meant security was lax. The members of the LCC learned how to pick locks and deactivate alarms; they climbed a lot more, too. In his thesis, Garrett describes this as ‘reacting to surveillance and control over urban space’ through ‘urban interventions that undermine clean spatio-temporal narratives’. ‘It may be against the law, but it’s not that much against the law,’ reasons Marc Explo. On the ideal explore, no one would know they had been there – they enter at their own risk, scornful at the idea of suing anyone should they get injured, and they leave everything as they found it. According to Garrett, they help security guards, by discovering (and blogging about) the flaws in their systems.

‘The adrenaline levels were almost debilitating, a near overdose of desire for 12 straight hours,’ said Garrett of a recent attempt to find British Museum station, the last of the abandoned Underground stations. The mission was high stakes, occurring shortly after Transport for London had caught the ‘Aldwych Four’ trespassing on the Central Line (a legal case is pending). Only one explorer made it; his account is on guerrilla exploring.com: ‘The track light indicator glowed a ghostly white, illuminating the dreaded words “On”. The risks were high... There isn’t much room between the non-live rail and the base of the tunnel curve.’

Despite the evident risks of electrocution, death by falling, or losing limbs to Underground trains, urban explorers consider skiing and rock climbing to be more dangerous. The only difference being ‘it’s socially acceptable for people to take risks in those circumstances because someone’s making money out of it,’ reasons Garrett. ‘People don’t see exploring as contributing. It’s better for the economy if we’re out drinking at night.’ Salisbury sees what they do as a reworking of conventional categories. ‘If we were to take a similar attitude towards the wilderness, that would be acceptable. Perhaps even if it were on private land, too; the right to roam is protected by laws. So the fact that we’re in the city is a factor.’

London itself is a factor, too; with its CCTV cameras, Olympics security boom and ASBOs, it is the hardest city in the world to crack, but its medieval heart, Victorian infrastructure and modern glass towers offer unparalleled riches. ‘You get these gaps and cracks introduced into the infrastructure, out of necessity, omission, neglect,’ says Garrett. ‘You can always find a way to wiggle through those gaps and cracks and get into those older layers of the city.’ Garrett, who grew up in the ‘cookie-cutter’ Californian suburbs, developed an interest in archaeology on week-long missions into the Mojave Desert to look for abandoned mines and prehistoric settlements. ‘A lot of the things that we’ve found here, like the abandoned Tube stations – those were much more exciting discoveries than anything I dug up in the desert,’ he says.

His favourite site was Down Street station on the Piccadilly Line, between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner. ‘It was a difficult station to crack: you have to sneak down a side alley in the middle of the night, and wiggle through a grate. The station itself is absolutely beautiful. It’s in perfect condition. You have Winston Churchill’s old war bunkers, which you can go and stand in. It has aspects of historical significance that really ping.’

If he takes an academic approach to exploration (his thesis is full of references to the situationist theorist Guy Debord), for Salisbury it is educational. His knowledge of civil engineering is extensive; his admiration for Sir Joseph Bazalgette knows few bounds. It also provides a sense of belonging. His girlfriend is not from Britain; she felt alienated when she first arrived in London, he tells me, but once she had climbed King’s Reach Tower at night, she began to get a handle on being a Londoner.

Marc Explo, by contrast, sees urban exploration as compensation for a mundane day job. On his website (ejectable.net), he describes a childhood watching superheroes on TV and playing com-puter games. Now, he describes his missions in those terms, such as a church in central Paris where he had to clamber over a line of gargoyles, which were electrified to deter pigeons. ‘It was a puzzle; how do you turn the electricity off?’ (I get the impression that dangling from non-electrified gargoyles would be fine.) ‘A bit like getting to the next level on a computer game.’ The parallel is intriguing.

One of the attractions of modern, first-person games is that they allow you to roam freely at will. You are the subject, your environment is your adventure. It is a common thread of a lot of the most resonant performance art of our time, such as Punchdrunk’s interactive theatre, Secret Cinema’s immersive movies, even Carsten Höller’s slides at Tate Modern. As a contrived experience, urban exploration is itself on that spectrum, a way of renegotiating reality, transforming the moment, turning the city into a video game. Except that, in this game, you only have one life.

I spoke to Bradley on the phone a few days after my mission. He had just come back from Edinburgh, where he had an interview for an academic post. He had used the opportunity to climb the Forth Railway Bridge. He did so alone, taking the last train to Queensferry before climbing rocks, then stairs, then making a ‘sort of jump’, and free-climbing the final girders. ‘I was on the superstructure, looking down, and then some track workers came and started welding. It was kind of scary.’ Unwilling to disturb them, he made a night of it. ‘I cracked a beer. I had Wired magazine. I just stayed until sunrise.’ In the event, the track workers left in plenty of time. The climb down, he said, was leisurely. ES

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