Old School – Part One

We found another amazing site recently. Here’re the results of some 4 hours exploring and adventuring through the place and the cream of a crop of ~400 photographs.

This place was very easy to access and I’d be highly surprised if anyone cared that we were in there (especially judging by the sheer volume of graph and broken stuff). It used to be a tertiary school in a yesteryear, which meant our adventure was through tiers of musty, dark hallways and old, misused classrooms. Both inside and out were spectacular, the outside was overgrown and the inside was a bizarre, decayed playground.

One of the most amazing features at this site were the floor textures. Clearly there’s a serious water leakage problem in the buildings and this has caused various types of chaos to the floors (not to mention the roofs), which made for fantastic photography fodder. These shots are my favourites from this outing, these floors blew my mind. In many places, it was as if the worlds largest box of Jenga pieces had bees scattered all through the rooms.

A recurring theme throughout all of the abandoned places that we’ve visited is the street art, which in many cases is highly talented and makes for a perfect backdrop to otherwise post-apocalyptic settings.

There were also no shortage of pitch black rooms, creepy, dark hallways and moody, ambient spaces. I love the feeling of moving from one dark room or building to the next, with each turn or bend holding any number of secrets and surprises. Every time we leave one of these sites I’m always filled with an honest sense of achievement and wonder, these may well just be some the last places left for the longing adventure and exploration of yore.

I found this heart breaking letter in one room. It’s from a student thanking their teacher for support during their cancer treatments. As always, I left the note untouched for another intrepid explorer to read about the tragedies of yesterday’s ghosts one day.

Speaking of ghosts, it was an eerie and haunting place in some areas (made even more so by my companion creeping about in shadows). I don’t prescribe to a belief in ghosts, but this place certainly bears the signs of ghosts of past students, teachers and who-knows-who-else.

Walking between different buildings granted some really interesting vistas too. It was great peering in at old, broken rooms through the bars of a rusty grill or shattered glass.

I have at least as many more interesting photos from the other three or four buildings we ventured in to at this site – I’ll put this part two up soon.