#298 – Ainscoughs Flour Mill

Another joint explore with Gibbo and R1. Standing prominent on the rural south Lancashire flatlands, is a tall brick chimney and a Victorian flour mill. Probably the largest and highest structure between Liverpool and Preston, Ainscough’s flour mill was once a major employer in the quiet little town of Burscough. It closed in the late 90’s…

#295 – Old Urbex Reports – Pyestock Part 2

And so on to the famous air house. This large building contained 8 centrifugal compressor/exhauster sets that blew large volumes of high pressure air to all the test bays across site, and is probably the best known building due to the huge number of photographs on urbex sites of its multi coloured turbines. I had…

#294 – Old Urbex Reports – Pyestock Part 1

Number 10 Exhauster Cell Number 10 Exhauster Cell control room Hidden deep in woodland between the mainline railway and what is now Farnborough Airport, lies a huge, once top-secret aircraft engine test facility, abandoned and decaying, silent and eerie, no longer reverberating with the screaming wails of gas turbines and jet engines. This area was…

#293 – Re-visiting photos 2

More reworked photos! These are from Edenwood Mill, which if still standing, must be a pile of soggy wood and rubble as it was in a right state back in 2008. This one hasn’t really benefitted much from the monochrome conversion compared to some, but the lens corrections have slightly improved things.   The next…

#292 – Re-visiting photos 1

I’m in the middle of putting some themed Blurb books together and went for a rummage round the darker recesses of my Lightroom catalogue. Lightroom is a great piece of software and I now tend to do much of my photo editing on it (apart form mono conversions and multi layer work), and it’s a vastly…

#290 – Book Review – Detroit Disassembled

Andrew Moore’s ‘Detroit Disassembled’ is a book that’s been on my wish list for a couple of years now. I’d discovered it just after it came out, as it was released at a similar time to the eye-wateringly expensive ‘The Ruins Of Detroit’ by Yves Marchand, but at about half the price. It’s certainly got…

#267 – Brymbo Photographs in Urban Realm Magazine

I correspond every now again with Mark Chalmers who shares an interest in urban exploration, and he recently asked me if he could use some photos from Brymbo Steelworks to illustrate an article he was writing for Urban Realm magazine . The article is a feature on a final year MA architecture project based on…

#262 – Prestolite of Leyland

  I was quite surprised to stumble across this vast crumbling edifice, less than 10 minutes from my home, as most of the former Leyland Motors plants in Leyland had been cleared. Yet, sat behind rows of houses and a dense row of shrubs was this huge, wartime-era factory, now empty after its last occupants…

#261 – Cheadle Bleachworks

For reasons that are, at best unclear, and at worse, downright weird, I have this thing about industrial ruins. Not so ruined that you can’t tell what it was, but ruined enough to be beyond repair. Proper mongy old crap – roofs caved in, doors hanging off and such like. They’re usually quick to explore…

#259 – Staffordshire Collieries Part 1 – Chatterley Whitfield

  Another one from the archives here, this was an ‘official’ visit to this crumbling edifice on a so-called open day. Actually, that’s being harsh and doing a disservice to our guides from the Friends of Chatterley Whitfield, who are probably more disappointed about the condition of this place than anyone else, and I’m sure…