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December 07, 2025 - @273.24 (what is this?)
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Author Topic: Urban Exploring!  (Read 431 times)
Notabot
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« on: October 21, 2025 @782.78 »

Hello :D

For some time now, I've been watching a lot of videos about urban exploring, so I just wanted to ask if there are any people here who have ever done something like this or even do it as a hobby :eyes: and have had any special experiences while doing so.I would really like to try something like this myself, but there are no lost places near me, and I don't have any friends who are interested in doing it, and I'm far too scared to go anywhere like that on my own :trash:

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Dan Q
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« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2025 @815.74 »

When I was more young-and-foolish (nowadays I'm old-and-foolish) I did a little, mostly around the UK. Some favourites were:

What is now the site of Deepdale Retail Park in Preston was light industry (a brickworks, a Coca-Cola factory etc.) in the 1970s and then just became a... nothing... for until 1993. One of my earliest jaunts of urban exploration was a friend and I lifting a manhole cover to explore the tunnels and cellars that had once existed below the factories of the site.

Whittingham Hospital was large secure psychiatric unit in Lancashire until it shut down for good in the early 1990s. On a couple of occasions in my teens some friends and I would cycle out there and scale the fences to break in to the ruin. It was, incredibly, exactly as creepy as every horror film would make you think exploring an abandoned mental ward (with a terrible history of abuse of patients by staff) was. Strangely, it always felt like it was abandoned in a hurry: we found filing cabinets full of typewritten files, left to rot in old brick buildings with broken doors and roofs. Years later - presumably sick of urban explorers breaking in! - the council made the fences more-secure, and a couple of decades later I gather than the site's been mostly-demolished. Still a real shaping experience for me.

The bunkers of Hitler's Atlantic Wall, Hauts-de-France region of France. While many significant WWII sites are rightfully museums, many are simply abandoned. There's a pillbox bunker just a quarter of an hour's cycle from where I live right now, for example, that was part of the 3rd defensive line (part of the network of "stop lines" that would theoretically have allowed the UK to keep fighting had Germany engaged Operation Sealion and invaded mainland Britain), that's since fallen into the River Windrush but can be explored when the water level is low so long as you don't mind getting wet and aren't claustrophobic! Anyway: I took the opportunity when I was in France once to explore some of the "other side" of these bunker lines. These huge, concrete monstrosities are too numerous and monstrous to demolish, too commonplace for every one to be a museum about itself, so mostly they're just a crumbling concrete shell of the Third Reich's gun emplacements, just an older version of what they were when they were overrun by the Allies. I met a homeless family living in one of them, but my French was too poor to engage in a proper conversation and mostly I just wanted to give them their privacy (it's bad enough having to live in a decrepit bunker without a tourist wandering around your home).

Alexandria Hall, Aberystwyth: the first halls of residence of the University of Aberystwyth to accept female students, in 1896, ninety years later it got shuttered and mothballed and stayed that way until it reopened in 2004. This gave me and others plenty of time to break in and explore. I enjoyed how large and sprawling it was; how cavernous and bare, but this didn't feel as special as some of the other expeditions because it had clearly been explored plenty before we got there!

I've also found my way into and around several urbex places as a result of hobbies like geocaching and geohashing. A particular favourite might have been when my partner's brother and I explored some old foundries, now completely buried in dense forest, during a geocaching expedition (itself while on the way back from a cross-country adventure, but that's another story).

That's off the top of my head, and I'd better stop because I keep thinking about more: disused railway tunnels (including one that wasn't as abandoned as I first thought, leading me to have to stand hard against the wall to avoid a passing freight train!) were always a hit for my dad and I, once upon a time!

But in short: yeah, I guess I've dipped my toe into urban exploring. There are culverted rivers under Oxford I'd like to explore, someday, as well as an old service tunnel I've heard about that runs underneath a major motorway (!), which sounds pretty exciting. So maybe there's still more for me to see and do.
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AnIzzi0t
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« Reply #2 on: October 21, 2025 @816.72 »

I've been urban exploring before!! its a really fun hobby of mine :) it started when me and my grandma broke into an abandoned house on her property. typically, you SHOULD NOT TAKE STUFF FROM ANY BUILDINGS YOU EXPLORE!!!! but we found a notebook and a VHS tape and my 12 year old game theory addicted ass couldnt help myself
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« Reply #3 on: October 21, 2025 @851.62 »

Re: Dan Q

WOW! That sounds extremely exciting.
Actually, I almost went to a lost place with one of my friends once, and we had already planned a weekend for it but one day before he went back alone and the ceiling almost fell on his head because the building was so old.
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« Reply #4 on: October 29, 2025 @832.94 »

I was super into UrbanEx and still do sometimes. I live in Texas so it can be rough in the summer because the heat here is so oppressive. Some of the coolest places around here is the tunnels around here... well, impossible to explore those in the summer when it is usually 110 degrees +...

A few points if you want to get into Urban Exploring
  • As It has been said, don't take anything. just explore. You may be taking someone's belongings.
  • Try to bring a friend, if you can't find someone at all, explore in daytime. switchblades are best for self defense if you need, but always stay calm. you'll be just fine.
  • Approach EVERYONE with charity and kindness, if you come across someone, they are probably just taking a nap, turn around and leave. or they are a security guard. Turn around and leave, stay calm. I have been stopped more by security guards than i have found people sleeping.
  • Bring plenty of water and a flashlight, don't rely on your phone. Maybe some water to share. Headlamps are awesome. i know a lot of abandoned buildings are abandoned from asbestos or other dangerous chemicals in the air. wear a gas mask!
  • BE AWARE and LOOK everywhere you go. there could be human feces... Study what you are exploring before going in. Respect the space. I don't explore private residences.
  • You can find spaces to explore by walking around. Thankfully my city is somewhat walkable. Don't park anywhere nearby you are exploring, walk there. This gives you plausible deniability if you are caught, I usually tell security guards I was walking by and just curious about the building and they just ask me to go to the sidewalk and stay away, I don't graffiti so they can see i'm just exploring. The only time I had to run from cops is when i had a friend graffiting on the highway. >_> Try not to bring friends that are that dumb.

I am a walker and busser so I walk around the city and pin places i want to explore. do a perimeter check and explore after. good amount of places I don't go in because they don't look safe. Due to either structurally unsafe or obvious hub for people who are unhoused. though the latter, if you catch them during the daytime, they are fairly friendly. i had a good soul looking around a spot with me, thinking i was a skater. (i'm not.) peeking in scratches that itch, but you don't put yourself in danger if you are unsure. 
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