Rule, or Roel, is a young Belgian photographer who says:
i used to visit some places in the neighborhood without a cam. Then my intrest in photography grew and i documented a few places, searched a bit on the net without even knowing the term Urbex.
But he was a natural for urbex; his photos are stunning!
Englishman Howzey has more than 2000 photos on Flickr, arranged by place and subject matter into something like 75 sets. The odd abandoned mansion was inevitable!
Explore more HERE
Cloggo, standing before these scenes, would ponder their workings and fill in the details from the past; whereas I marvel at how time and nature have claimed them since they were abandoned. There is no RIGHT way of looking at them, of course, although his is certainly more informative.
The above are abandoned machinery at the Cocking Limeworks in England while below is one from a set of 117 impressions of a hospital complex in Berlin.
Beelitz-Heilstatten was built in 1898 and used during both world wars.
Polanski filmed parts of his movie The Pianist there.
All photos by Howzey, in Flickr
Chernobyl from the inside
Having been born in Prypiat, nearby, she has returned there several times, and published this elegant, moving and very reflective illustrated essay (click pix or title) in 2004 — 18 years after the disaster. Other subjects she explores at her website are equally taboo — places of death and incarceration, including the gulag, for example — and she is so outspoken about politics, and so independent that a reader can’t help worrying for her safety at times.
Here’s a taste (the captions are hers):
My favourite are roads that haven’t been ridden for years.
Sometimes, I leave a log on the road to see if someone else will travel here.
When I return in a year or two, seeing my log has not been moved suggests that I still have no followers.
Chernobyl is so easily forgotten because it was only known to ourselves.
In the first years after the accident we didn’t want to share our story with the world, now we can not share it, we hardly remember it ourselves.
All that remains of the tragic tale is a memory, weak and disfigured by time. In the future, indifference of people will smother the few remaining embers until at last they too are extinguished.
After that Chernobyl will always remain inside knowledge of a few eminent individuals and the sole property of nature.
Now here’s a little extra for you, Cloggo: Elena Filativa travels by motorbike and uses the nickname Kiddofspeed
She writes about her mode of travel: I have ridden all my life and over the years I have owned several different motorbikes.
I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big kawasaki ninja, that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips.
I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl “dead zone”, which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads.
The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.
In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago — except for an occasional blade of grass or some tree that discovered a crack to spring through.
Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again … a few centuries from now.
North Brother Island, New York (photograph via)
North Brother Island is an abandoned island in the East River situated between the Bronx and Riker’s Island. The island was uninhabited until 1885, when the Riverside Hospital was built.
Riverside Hospital was founded to treat and isolate victims of smallpox. Its mission eventually expanded to other quarantinable diseases. Typhoid Mary - the first person in the United States to be identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever - was confined to the island for over two decades until she died there in 1938. The hospital closed shortly thereafter.
After World War II, the island housed war veterans who were students at local colleges, along with their families. After the nationwide housing shortage abated, the island was once again abandoned.
…
The island is currently abandoned and off-limits to the public. Most of the original hospitals buildings still stand, but are heavily deteriorated and in danger of collapse. A dense forest conceals the ruined hospital buildings and supports one of the area’s largest nesting colonies of Black-crowned Night Heron.
Suggested by Mat Coes
And since “mad” people were recategorised and turned out onto the streets, the property that was not immediately redeveloped just gave itself up to nature. I would want to live there, in that room, just as it is!
It closely matches an image I have had in my mind since childhood, in fact, or a roughly round or octagonal house with a kitchen as the central hub and one large surrounding room, itself surrounded by trees.
The closest I ever saw to such a house in reality was this one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright: It was built in Pleasantville NY, and is in private hands; I have never seen the plan made available.
Mine is completely surrounded with trees.




