Category: Industrial

At The Bottom

In 2014 on a Urbexcentral excursion in the hills- Gunner (as per usual), saw this tower as a challenge rather than an obstacle and couldn’t be talked out of free climbing it. We waited in trepidation at the bottom, as he proceeded to knock the bastard off.

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Overload

A return and a farewell to an enormous, decaying industrial site- on the eve of its imminent demolition, decontamination and redevelopment. The soundtrack (The Overload) by Talking Heads, is the finale from their 1980 album “Remain in Light”.

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A Sweet Spinner’s Lament

In 1930, the first New Zealand-made bar of Cadbury chocolate was produced at biscuit maker Richard Hudson’s cocoa and chocolate manufacturing plant in Dunedin, founded in 1868. Hudson had been orphaned at the age of 9 and came to New Zealand in 1865. He became known as a caring employer who believed that everyone who contributed to a profitable business should benefit from its success. The company offered accommodation and even a recreational rifle range for its staff across the road from its present site. Cadbury was acquired by Mondelez International in a hostile takeover in 2009, and the factory didn’t quite last the decade following — closing its doors in March 2018. 350 jobs were lost in the closure. The site is now being demolished.
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Residual Controls

During our most recent visit to this sprawling fertiliser manufacturing plant we could see from the air that demolition was progressing apace. So it seems the right time to bid farewell to the place with an edit combining a complete set of our former explorations there with recent drone footage. The company that formerly operated the plant started trading in the late 1970s in response to the risk of a proposed merger creating a monopoly in the production of fertiliser in New Zealand.

Part One: “Diocletian Allegories” [0:00] High-ceilinged and partially flooded, parts of the compound had the feeling of an ancient Roman bath.

Part Two: “The World As A Machine” [8:14] The generous size of the site felt all-encompassing: an industrial micro-world.

Part Three: “Residual Controls” [14:51] We always enjoy getting our fingers occupied in environments where museum rules don’t apply.
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Across Time

This viaduct was built in 1908 during the ‘Age of Steel’, when steel plates, beams, girders and trusses held together with bolts and rivets were seen as the answer to almost all engineering problems. Curving elegantly amongst notoriously difficult terrain, it consists of steel lattice and mass concrete piers interspersed with Pratt truss and plate steel girders. It remained in use until 1987 when it was superseded by a creation of the ‘Age of Concrete’ as part of the electrification of the North Island Main Trunk (NIMT). At that time the decking was removed, and since then it has remained in the landscape as an inspiring site of groundbreaking New Zealand engineering history.
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Stothert & Pitt

Last restored in the year 2000, this 1950’s-era tripod crane built by Stothert & Pitt Ltd of England has recently had its boom lowered to the ground. Given that a future climb to the top has been rendered impossible by the removal of the majority of its boom ladder, this edit commemorates a climb made several years ago. Tripod cranes were in use throughout the world until the advent of container shipping in the 1960’s.
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Keith Butler

This incline was opened in 1889 in the South Island of New Zealand to transport coal by rail down from the mines it served. It operated for nearly a century until the closure of the mines. A caretaker, William Butler, stayed on when the settlement emptied out. On the 13th of September, 1988, a rainstorm caused a landslide, burying what remained of the settlement and killing Butler. His body and car were never found.
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Inclinations

Since the late 1960’s these coal tubs on the Millerton Incline in the northwest of the South Island of New Zealand have sat unmoving on their tracks. The Millerton Incline was built in 1891 and the mine it serviced began production five years later. The tubs would transport coal to Granity, which boasted at the time the largest wooden coal loading bins in the country. For the past half century coal production has shifted to the nearby Stockton coalfield.
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An Eye In The Earth

While exploring the small gold mining settlement of Waiuta, near Reefton in New Zealand, we found this little u-shaped tunnel network with two entrances nestled into the side of a bush-clad hill.
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Above The Glass

A couple of old chimneys tower over an abandoned glass factory near the village of Krushevo, in the municipality of Sevlievo, in Gabrovo Province, northern central Bulgaria. Gunner thanks his generous and kind hosts, Nicola Miller and Jonathan Taylor.

 

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Chiller

A video from a couple of years ago- wandering around the creepy ruins of an abandoned cool-stores facility in Taranaki. Happy Halloween folks 😉

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Power Station

This thermal power station was completed in 1972 and was decommissioned between 2001 and 2008, it’s chimney was once the tallest structure in New Zealand, it is now being demolished and in the final stages of demolition.

We began exploring this Power Station back in Easter where after trekking down in the darkness from the top of a hill we eventually reached a shoreline where we met a couple of angry seals who we had to dodge as they tried to attack us. Once we found our way in, avoiding light and the risk of areas with motion detectors we reached the main building, our eyes were greeted with a wonderland of ‘pipe-porn’ and steel. The first thing we knew we wanted to hit was the turbine room and to reach this we needed to scale some ladders through the maze of pipes and steel.

Upon reaching the turbine room we found a gigantic space full of yellow turbines, all fully lit up, the whole place echoed as you walked through it which made us feel on edge. After documenting the turbine room we advanced on to find the control room, from intel we had been given we attempted to enter through to the control room where we were met by locked doors, the control room was not to be seen that visit.

Included in this post are pictures months apart, the second series of pictures were pictures taken when the turbine room was mostly deconstructed but we finally found an intact control panel room :).

 

Power Station from the coast
Power station chimney detached!
Ladders up to the control room
Beneath the turbines
Turbine room
Turbine room
Turbine
Turbine room
Turbine room
Controls inside turbine room
Dismantled controls
Dismantled pipe-porn
Now dismantled under the turbines
Remnants of the turbine room
Remnants of the turbine room
Remnants of the turbine room
Remnants of the turbine room
Sealed off control panels in turbine room
Entrace to the control room
Control room
Control room
Control room
Control room
Control room
Control station 1
Control station 2
Evacuation
Map of alarms at the power station
Futuristic control panels
Futuristic control panels
Futuristic control panels
Control
Gauges
Emergency phone
Turbine room controls
Control room
Alarm panel
Guages
Control station 2
Control station 3
Control station 3
Control station TV
Control room
Graphs
This way to control room
Active power
Active power grids
Active power grids
Active power grids
Time to go

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Gunkanjima

One of us was lucky enough to visit legendary “Gunkanjima” a few years ago. Hashima Island, known locally as Gunkanjima (Battleship Island)- is situated off the coast of Japan near Nagasaki. Mitsubishi purchased the island in 1890 and began the project of extracting coal from undersea mines. They built Japan’s first large concrete building (9 stories high) in 1916 to accommodate the burgeoning ranks of workers. Concrete was specifically used to protect against typhoon destruction. In 1959, the 6.3-hectare (16-acre) island’s population reached its peak of 5,259, with a population density of 835 people per hectare for the whole island. As petroleum replaced coal in the 1960s, coal mines began shutting down all over the country, and Hashima’s mines were no exception. Mitsubishi officially announced the closure of the mines in 1974, with the local workers/inhabitants having to vacate their island fortress immediately.

Gunkanjima is increasingly gaining international attention, not only for its modern regional heritage, but also for the undisturbed housing complex remnants representative of the period. In the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, the island served as an inspiration for the lair of villain Raoul Silva, but filming did not take place on the island itself. One section was recreated at Pinewood Studios in England and the rest via CGI. In 2013, Google sent an employee to the island with a Street View backpack to capture its condition in panoramic 360-degree views and allow users to take a virtual walk across the island. Google also used its Business Photos technology to let users look inside the abandoned buildings, complete with old black-and-white TVs and discarded soda bottles.

Battleship Island

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2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for Urbex Central. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for 2014…

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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