Topic: Urbex ... you know this word?

[Sandeha Lynch]

You probably do, Urbex is an abbreviation for Urban Exploration ... there's even an entry in Wikipedia.  I didn't, though evidently it's what I do from time to time.

Anyway, a couple of friends on a local Flickr group brought it up and suggested an excursion to mid-Wales ... specifically to an abandoned asylum they knew of.

Founded in 1900, closed in 2000, Talgarth Asylum was built to house between 300 and 400 patients.  It is now being redeveloped as a business park. 



          

          

          

     



I'd just got my Hasselblad body back from the maintenance shop and it was dying for a spin.  The weather was crap or I'd have stayed longer, but still, two rolls of Tri-X, dev'd in DDX.

Enjoy.

[rdbkorn]

I wasn't familiar with the word, but you certainly came away with a nice set of images.

[moominsean]

i do a lot of rurex. if it isn't a word, it is now.

[russmorris]

Nice work! The opener is a stunner with all that pattern in the flooring.

[LT]

I really like these Sandeha - and having lived and worked in the Kent County Lunatic Asylum (latterly known as St Augustine's Hospital) as a student nurse as it was in it's last few years - these sights you've captured are very familiar. Many of the wards were derelict and badly boarded up  - the place was quite a bit bigger than the one you visited - several thousand at capacity if I recall correctly, many of whom would find their way back to their old home and sleep rough until discovered and returned to their res. home/ b&b/ Guest house by the sea.  A very sad place to be at the time. I was only 19 then so it was long before I got into photography, but I wish I had been.  The place is long gone now, only a water tower, entrance hall, church and one of the nurses accommodation blocks remain - all converted into des-reses in a sea of a modern lego-land type housing estate, of course.  Now, I know the arguements for the deconstruction of institutional care, and the benefits are manifold, but ... so many of the people I subsequently worked with in the community who had memories of past admissions there said how much they missed peace and feeling of removal from chaos that they experienced by being taken from normality for a while - the true meaning of Asylum.  Now-a-days they get stuck in a locked ward, usually several floors up with no fresh air for days on end (of course the windows dont open incase someone throws themselves out), pumped full of life-shortening drugs with side effects the likes of something from a horror film, then discharged with little follow and no hope - and the system wonders why patients spend their life in  series of admissions through a revolving door!

see - you got me started now.

Skorj is very much into Urbex as you call it - hopeful he'll chip in with some of his amazing experiences - japan definitely seems to be the place for this kind of thing.   

[Sandeha Lynch]

Leon, of the few forums where I've posted these, yours is the longest and most personal response.  And I'm glad to read it.  The stimulus to visit the estate came from one of my local Flickr pals who had seen this work ... http://www.silverstealth.co.uk/ ... so it had to be visited.  I only wish the weather had been better, as it warranted more than the two hours we spent there.

You tend to hear two kinds of story from these places.  One, of the nightmarish entrapment, the fear, and the occasional abuse; and two, of joy and a stressless existence, full of laughter, and free from harm.  Presumably both aspects made up the reality and the history that remains.  When I came back to the UK in 2004 the first work I could get was as a mental health support worker for a local charity day centre and workshop.  No longer the language-teaching computer-geek, I ran the cafe.  CaerLas in Swansea provided a creative outpost for people who were otherwise cared for in-the-community.

Walking into a deserted and derelict building is one thing.  Walking into someone's home and being confronted by their broken chariot is quite another.

[LT]

Walking into a deserted and derelict building is one thing.  Walking into someone's home and being confronted by their broken chariot is quite another.

Especially when the chariot has an emergency rear waste disposal aperture. 

I fully take your point about the bad aspects of the large institutions - and when they were bad, they were literaly hell.  So much so that it turned me away from nursing all together and I eventually attempted to tackle the same conundrum from a different angle as a mental health social worker = but then I was responsible for admitting people to the places that I so terribly disagreed with  - so no more of that either ... hopefully the legal training I'm doing will enable me to represent patients from a third different angle.  We'll see how it goes.

I guess my point is the asylums were closed with the promise of a new better provision but ended up supplanting bad with differently bad.