Legs and Borders

Three days spent under Paris with some excellent company. Big thanks to Jobs for organizing, Maniac for driving and to everyone in the group for making it an awesome trip. Bombay mix of characters and temperaments worked out well. Treat this report as a general overview and my personal highlight of the Catacombs, place is huge it would take another ten visits to properly document it. This are few snaps i managed to take with my compact camera (dropped the idea of taking DSLR down there). Visited with: AndyJ, Bigjobs, Eliot5200, Franconian, Frosty, Gaj, Hils, Keïteï, Maniac and SirJonnyP. History:  Catacombs of Paris are built within a forty meter layer of Lutécien limestone, it built up over millions of years and was originally covered by ocean. As a proof, fossils of small sea creatures can be seen in the rocks in several areas of the Catacombs. The area began to be quarried by the Romans in open air quarries. It wasn't until 12th century until the technique of diggi...

Severalls was for me exploring in the correct sense of that word.  To make the boring bit short i only had a rough idea about how to get in as decided to go there in last minute and didn't have much time to contact anyone [recived the info afterwards though, lol] so the improvisation level was very high... To say the least i had to jump over (way to) many fences and eventually had a meet up with the razor wire,  unfortunately it was on the way in, but decided to stay since i had a long journey to get there.. Approached the hospital from the northern side and had a good walk around there (first pic.) then discovered that it is not where i should be, so made my way to the correct part of it, security was doing their rounds, so it took me a while to finally get inside, after that everything went quite smooth (apart of facing another lot of fences on the way out) Severalls was a psychiatric hospital built in 1910 which first opened in May 1913 and housed some 2000 pa...

Crazy explore, it was supposed to be done by 4 and ended up in a group of 10 people :) Site i secured very well, with car driving around all the time - we had a nice little chase on the way out.. The National Gas Turbine Establishment (NGTE Pyestock) in Fleet, part of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), UK was the prime site in the UK for design and development of gas turbine and jet engines. It was created by merging the design teams of Frank Whittle's Power Jets and the RAE turbine development team run by Hayne Constant. NGTE spent most of its lifetime as a major testing and development center, both for experimental developments as well as supporting the major commercial engine companies. For over 50 years  Pyestock was at the forefront of gas turbine development and was almost certainly the largest site of its kind in the world. V Bomber, Harrier and Tornado engines were all rigorously tested on site, the power of the air house allowed Concorde's engines to be t...

This location has been on to do list for a while, access has been quite difficult but worth a while :) Hospital was originally constructed between 1862 and 1866 at the behest of the London Commissioners in Lunacy to provide for pauper lunatics from the London area. The buildings were designed in a Gothic brick style by James Bunstone Bunning, and the facility accommodated 220 patients. In 1924 the facility was renamed the City of London Mental Hospital, and in 1948 it was taken over by the new National Health Service and became known as Stone House Hospital. A 1998 assessment by Thames Healthcare suggested that the hospital was not suited for modern healthcare; plans for the hospital's closure were initiated in 2003. [taken from wikipedia.org]

This is one of the iconic urban exploration sites in London, built in 1905 by William Vernon and Sons, bought by Spillers shortly afterwards and named after their “Millennium Flour” of the time, though apparently the mill was also used for making the dog food for which Spillers were famous. It was partially destroyed by a massive explosion at the neighbouring Brunner Mond’s works in 1917, extended massively around 1933 and de-commissioned in the mid 1980’s. Entrance was a lot of fun, with all the sneaky ninja bits on the way.