Exploring Un-Space
February 2012
13 posts
Urbex Abroad
Well, it was bound to happen eventually. Denmark is getting too small, time to head out and see what’s on the other side of the border. Besides Denmark was and probably never will be an outstanding country for urbexing. I’m amazed at the places abroad I’ve seen photos of online, they’re in a whole different league then what’s around here.
So plans have been made, I’m heading down to Berlin next month for five days of extensive urban exploration and I’m excited like you wouldn’t believe.
Berlin and Germany in general is a great place for UE. There’s so many interesting abandonments around down there; post-war military sites, hospitals, factories ect..
Man, I can’t wait to check out the sites I’ve gathered.
I’ve been doing photographic urban exploration for a year now, and I’m still hungry for more, so I suppose it’s kind of fitting to upscale this hobby now at my one year anniversary.
In your recent post you said you read newspapers online. What are you looking for in them that leads you to new places. I've burned tons of miles on the car looking for places. I like to get a bit more efficient.
It’s hard to say what to look for specifically. Sometimes just searching for the obvious keywords like “abandoned”, “decaying”, “unused building” etcetera is enough to find something worthwhile. Also the financial crisis sadly got a lot of people going bankrupt, and sometimes you can find a location under such a story. For example, I found an abandoned hospital through an article about a company, that was unable to raise the needed funds to restore the hospital into apartments.
I don’t know where you’re from, but here in Denmark buildings rarely stand abandoned for long before the local community seeks and demands action to either put it back to use or tear it down, which will usually put it in the papers.
I’ve got every online newspaper (be it local or national) bookmarked and scout through them occasionally. That’s probably the best advice I can give; built a database of all the small town newspapers online, search through them and keep checking up on them in the future.
Another thing you can do is search for commercial industrial buildings and land put on sale through real estate companies. Force auctions of industrial buildings and office buildings are getting more common, especially when the owner has neglected a building for a long time and let it fall into decay. Of course there’s also residential buildings, but they’re usually not that interesting.
How To Find Un-Space.
I often get asked how to find these abandoned buildings. Well, there’s no clear answer really. Sometimes I’ll just get in my car and drive around in hope of coming across something, but only when I grasping at straws. I mostly find them by scouting the internet, reading local newspapers online is how I come across most. Google Maps is an essential resource, at least for me it is. If you have an idea of where there’d might be something worth checking out Street View can be very helpful, and extremely frustrating and time consuming as well. But that’s just it though; all the “detective work” of discovering derelict sites can be horribly frustrating and time consuming, but like they say “the harder the work, the sweeter the reward” and it’s true.
Persistence is the keyword here. Keep at it you’ll find something eventually. It’s easy when you start out because anything will probably make you excited, but after a while you’ll become picky and that small thrashed abandoned house just isn’t enough anymore.
