Ok, I'm camping it up but it was a bloody brilliant day U.E'ing...
I arrrived at Cambridge station in a buoyant mood (having had a pleasant journey spotting pillboxes and ROC posts from the train).
Met Xevious in person for the first time and we headed off to what would be the first of four explorations of the day- It would also be the most disasterous.
Ok RSG
We circled the site of an RSG (Regional Seat of Government- A highly protected bunker from which the important people could run the country in wartime/apocalypse) which was surrounded by building contractors. The whole area was a mass of govt. buildings that had been sold off and was being redeveloped and this made access via the front impossible. We parked up and Xevious led me along a public footpath that would take us behind the site. There poking through the trees was the enormous, faceless slab of concrete we had been looking for.(Fig 1) Although covered in Ivy its brutal structure could still be seen viewed from our position, I salivated (Homer style) Mmnn... Bunker... Only problem was the stream that lay between us and the RSG- And the fence... and the barbed wire...
Hurriedly we searched the path for a suitable crossing. It was six feet of water with about four foot of bank on the other side covered in small fir trees which we figured we could push our way through to a gap in the fence (We had only noticed one fence at this point, there we actually two between us and the bunker).
Deciding to go for it having not found an actual crossing I chucked my rucksack accross and then with a run-up... made it accross, just. Xevious fell short by about six inches but anyway we were accross! Now to make our way through the undergrowth. After about ten minutes of crawling, twenty metres of ground and about three bemused stares from passers by we realised that the undergrowth formed a wall ahead- We could'nt make it. On the way back part of the bank gave way beneath me and both my feet went in- Wonderful!
We got back to our crossing point and realised that the bank we stood on was lower than the one we had jumped from and there was no room on this side for a run up- We were stuck.
After several minutes of tree climbing and talk of raft building we both accepted that we had to jump back accross.
We walked back to the car looking like the Lost Mud Tribe of Ummigumgum both of us soaked and pissed off that we had failed a the first hurdle... little did we know that the initial failure would soon be forgotten as we indulged in some of the best Urban Exploration anyone could hope for.
Photographic Factory
After a trip to Xevious' parents place for a change of clothes and an emergency brew to fortify our shattered confidence (It wasn't really I'm just being dramatic again) we set off for an abandoned photographic factory that Xevious had discovered.
We parked up in a layby and walked down the drive to the closed down works. The place was huge and wide open. There was evidence of the travellers who had been camped there all around but they had pretty much left the factory alone due to the asbestos warning signs.
We skirted round taking our exterior shots
(Fig. 2) and then went in through an entrance in a small courtyard area. I was paranoid about the asbestos and was trying not to breathe in too much but even so the familiar old UE smell of plaster board and damp pervaded the air. We went through the first room and in to a corridor. I don't know why but the first long corridor in an exploration is definitely the best bit- Its the sudden realisation of how much unknown ground there is to cover (with the bite of adrenalin) having just got in to the building and not knowing what you are gonna find.
The building was single story and basically an m shaped structure or at least an extended capital T shape- So one long corridor to which three others join.
The place was gutted and had been used by a local ATS group as storage so discovering the identity of some of the rooms was difficult. The ones we didn't have a problem recognising we the dark rooms with their light fittings and places where tanks of developing fluid or work desks may have gone. The layout was exciting with many nooks and crannys to explore the only dissapointment was the lack of artifacts... untill we discovered the motherload.
In one roon near the centre of the building we discovered a room with a huge pile of paper in it. It was old stle perforated printer paper with TOP SECRET in red at the top of each sheet!!!
Obviously left from when it was an ATS place (We eventually found signs and an ATS raffle book) this paper had been left to gather dust in this empty building.
What could have been typed on this paper and what messages had been typed on paper like this?
We found several other things of interest here such as a sunken pit in one of the rooms with a collapsing floor , a locked safe (God knows why that had been left?) and the roof (Well I like exploring roofs!) See OffKilter2 site for RAF OFFKILTER. http://mysite.freeserve.com/Offkilter2