Going Underground

Abstract

While the act itself is surely an old one, the practice of exploring (mostly abandoned) man-made structures has only evolved into ‘Urbexing’ recently. Fuelled by the potential of blogs and message boards, ‘Urban Explorers’ worldwide document their adventures online, sharing accounts of trips down catacombs or into long-closed sanatoria. Their text posts are almost always accompanied by photographs. Many of the Urbexers make the metaphorical underground aspect of their craft literal, and seek out structures below the surface; indeed Silent UK, an Urbex collective posting since 2001, divides its website into adventures ‘Above’ and ‘Below’.1 Among the latter category are visits to several closed London Underground stations – ‘ghost’ stations – which the team has infiltrated. Silent UK's photographs of Brompton Road Underground, closed in 1934 and recently put up for sale by the Ministry of Defence, feature uncannily empty passages which, but for the dirt and soot, could easily be mistaken for other (open) stations on the network.2 The images show still-present handrails, and the original station tiling; occasionally they are disrupted by bricked-up tunnels, so that one wall simply reads ‘BROMPT’.3