Tales of the Urban Explorer: The Furniture Factory

Some of the best places you can find are found by driving past them. Keep your eyes open and you see..., and see much.

I saw this wreck of a place but it was far from good.

Something had been attached to the side of this decaying furniture factory and a little digging told me it used to be a pub, demolished several years before.

Why they didn’t carry on with the demolition I don’t know, the building that remains is a mess with lots of holes in the roof and can be clearly viewed by walking on the Leeds / Liverpool canal.

I could see from the bridge there was an entrance into this old warehouse that it was derelict, and that dodgy graffiti fest of a van had not been driven recently.

To the left looked like a way in if I could scramble down the bank and navigate the canal without falling in and drowning.

Parking up I left a muttering @bingbabe in the car who refused to accompany me and walked around the other side to see anti-climbing fencing pushed over.

...'anti-climbing fencing in it's finest form, pushed over and collapsed'...

There were a couple of Asian blokes walking close by giving me strange looks, but I chose to ignore them.

This is where the pub used to be, the metal door was unyielding but didn’t go anywhere.

I needed to jump down this embankment which was around a 6-foot drop. How I would get back up would be a problem for later.

…’I haven’t done this shit since I was around 15 years old, just what was I thinking?’…

I eased my way down the wall trying not to give myself a massive jump and deftly hit the soft earth below, so far so good.

The rusty metal fence could be manipulated by hanging on to it while swinging around and dodging the barbed wire.

It wasn’t so bad and I found myself in the compound with those same Asian blokes in huddled conversation and gawking at me now from the other side of the canal.

Trying to look as official as possible (without wearing a high visibility outfit) I proceeded to snap a load of photographs of the immediate surroundings.

Remnants of the old pub were strewn about, they must have just thrown all this clobber into next doors junkyard during demolition. Very thoughtful of them!

I peeked inside and found it quite dark. Not expecting to be doing any interior Urbex that day, I had failed to bring the huge light with me.

The inside was full of bric-a-brac of all sorts. I was standing on brand new window frames soiled by many footprints before mine. The rest of the junk was furniture and looked abandoned.

Further inside got darker though the roof was peppered with many holes. Going to the second storey without a back up was out of the question. I’m kind of stupid but there are limits.

I never did find the stairs, they may have been behind all the junk at the back. Thinking about what I saw, there’s little worth stealing if that’s what I would have come for which I didn’t.

I was inside for only around ten minutes all the time having the nagging feeling I would soon hear a siren.

The two blokes had clearly seen me enter and not exactly through the front door, and so I retraced back to where the 6-foot wall was and looked at what I needed to do.

...'a watery death awaits just one slip while navigating this metal fencing'...

There an old window frame or something I could stand on to help me up. I wasn’t the first person to nosily look into this old barn or whatever else you may want to call it.

It took me four massive heaves to get my leg onto the wall, my arms struggling to heave my bulk up.

I’m not a heavy bloke weighing in around 12 stones (168 pounds), but my arms just wouldn’t work.

…’hoisting myself up a 6 foot wall would have been easy… once’…

Scrambling on my belly, I managed to get my body up after a most enormous effort and walked around the building back to the car.

It was maybe 30 minutes later when my shoulder started aching. Why the delayed reaction I don’t know, but for almost 4 months that shoulder ached and hurt.

If anything I was annoyed by this ‘betrayal’ of my body.

…’how dare you let me down when I need you!’…

Perhaps I need to start doing some strengthening exercises in preparation for the more demanding climbs I need to perform when attempting to invade more interesting locations.

All images are my own unless cited.

• Earn Passive Manna by simply signing up for it here. Mannabase is a Universal Basic Income Cryptocurrency
• Earn STEEM and digital cards while playing STEEM Monsters, the best game on the STEEM Blockchain here.
• Earn JSECoin buy simply creating an account and Mine while you browse here
  

If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, resteem, engage me or all of these things.

Disclosure: Posts on TravelFeed may contain affiliate links. See affiliate disclosure.