![]() Up at the avant-garde of urbex are the infiltrators, the "real" explorers, who tend to be more stimulated by systems and networks than by single sites, and who cherish the challenge involved in accessing super-secure locations. Their archives are carefully curated on websites, their identities disguised with pseudonyms and firebreaks. Then there are the self-styled "guerilla preservationists", deep into heritage theory, and genuinely committed to creating a coherent photographic and textual record of buildings that would otherwise crumble unnoticed until a developer arrived to raze all trace of them. Every modern-day mountain summit shot owes a debt to Friedrich's painting, and UE has absorbed and adapted the same image. Such images unmistakably have their origin in Caspar David Friedrich's icon of Romanticism, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818): the dark frock-coated traveller atop his peak, with the mists of unknowing spread out beneath him. Photography is important to the adventurers too, they specialise in the "hero shot": the lone explorer seen from behind on the rim of a building or bridge, or heavily backlit (partly to preserve anonymity) and framed in a storm-drain or archway. Photograph: Scott CadmanĪlong from the ruinistas come the adventurers, who are mostly out for the kicks. The hero shot … Robert Macfarlane at an underground reservoir. If urban explorers didn't exist, China Miéville would have had to invent them. The cultural origins of urbex would include, to my mind, Tarkovsky's Stalker, the fiction of JG Ballard, old-school mountaineering and caving, blasts of steampunk (there is a love of girders, rivets and brickwork), console culture ( Bioshock), apocalypse dreams (from Planet of the Apes to The Road), the Mission Impossible films and (inevitably) Guy Debord and his situationist dérive – the randomly motivated walk designed to disrupt habitual movement through the cityscape. You should be content on the counterweight of a crane 400 feet above the street, or skanking along a sewer 10 yards under the asphalt. Among the sites in your sights are disused factories and hospitals, former military installations, bunkers, bridges and storm-drain networks. ![]() Archive and web skills are useful too, for acquiring the schematics and blueprints that will inspire and orient you. Among the requirements for participation are claustrophilia, lack of vertigo, a taste for decay, a fascination with infrastructure, a readiness to jump fences and lift manhole covers, and a familiarity with the laws of access in whatever jurisdiction you're undertaking your explorations. Urban exploration, urbex or UE is recreational trespass in the built environment. ![]() U rban exploration: a guide for the uninitiated.
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