The quest took him to the top of the newly constructed Shard, down some of London’s deepest and most secret tunnels, and inside a town-sized nuclear bunker beneath Bath.

Soon Garrett found himself being sucked into the life of the urban explorer and his motivations moving beyond academic interest to a full-on engagement with the quest for increasingly audacious hacks. They’re recording places that an archaeologist or historian maybe wouldn’t.” For his research Garrett embedded himself with a group called the London Consolidation Crew, or LCC, who had a growing reputation for daring explorations. “I found urban explorers, ” says Garrett, “and it seemed to me what they were doing was another kind of archaeology. Garrett, who has “hacked” over 500 sites in 15 different countries, originally moved to the UK as an American archaeologist and cultural geographer looking for new subjects to research. One person who perhaps most typifies the move from a fascination with the past to a complex engagement with the present is Bradley Garrett, academic, photographer, urban explorer and one-time head of London Transport Police’s most-wanted list. Motivations have shifted, and the stakes have become immeasurably higher. They explore so-called “live sites” like working metros, sewer systems and construction sites. Today urbexers are no longer content with just wandering around derelict buildings. But what makes these people risk capture, injury and sometimes even death can be as varied as the sites themselves.īut urban exploration has evolved a great deal since the classic days Cornwell describes. They wade through sewers, scale buildings, scamper like rats through abandoned tube stations and tip-toe through derelict factories, hospitals and insane asylums. Urban explorers visit parts of the city that have been abandoned, condemned or pronounced off limits. He is in fact a hobbyist, a practitioner of “urbex”, the modern art of urban exploration. He isn’t a homeless person sheltering from the weather. The man isn’t a drainage worker or a rescuer looking for trapped people. He flails desperately for seven or eight minutes before he starts to swallow water. He tries to climb out but powerful currents keep pulling him back.

As he gets closer, instead of stepping onto solid concrete as he expected, he drops into a 12-foot-deep pit filled with pounding water. He approaches a large pipe where the water is gushing into his tunnel. In a storm drain under the city one man sees the water levels rise alarmingly. In Edmonton, Canada, the rain is falling heavily outside.

Matthew williams urban explorer