Todays derelict house sits in the Shropshire countryside, quietely crumbling away.
I almost wasn't going to blog about it at all, but then I noticed a peculiar sign, and thought
"That's intriguing. There's a story here."
I don't know the story, but I can write a blog post about the absence of it, and I welcome any theories and/or knowledge.
Written on the wall, mystifying me, were the large faded letters spelling out "We won't live in town."
It kind of has the whole Walking Dead "Don't dead, open inside" thing going on. "We" and "live" are written on one side of the upstairs window while "Won't" and "In town" are on the other side.
But really it's baffling because this slogan, of considerable size, is not in any town. It's barely in a hamlet. The hamlet, and this house, show up on maps from the 1890s and in the past century barely anything has changed. I don't understand why someone would write this on a house that wasn't in town, unless their village was being unhappily consumed by an expanding town, which it isn't. The nearest town would have to expand to city-level proportions just to get this house into its suburb.
I took to Google streetview to see what this house looked like almost a decade ago, in 2009, and to my excitement, this message is still written on the wall, but there is more to it, which I missed on my visit because it was hidden under the ivy.
I got my hopes up for nothing though, because now it just says...
"We won't GO TO live in town."
Well, that answered nothing. I feel like I'm in a terrible episode of Catchphrase
There is another word though, which follows at the end of the statement, but I can't make that out, and given that the message was faded even in 2009, who knows when it was written?
And why is the house even empty? What happened to the people who lived here? Did they go to live in town?
It was time to move on before my mind exploded. The houses rear entrance was open, so slipping inside was easy, although years of decay meant that the houses structural stability was questionable. Nevertheless, we slipped inside.
The front room of the house had a broom, but it's been a long, long time since it was put to any use. What is cool is that the broom is handmade. The broom head has been attached to a regular wooden stick that was probably found in the woods.
This room is bloody spooky. I love it!
All that remains of the kitchen is the sink.
There's some bleach left in the pantry.
But for me, this is where the house got really weird, because to get around the entirety of the ground floor, we had to go up some stairs, and then down a different set of stairs. I've never known a house have that before, and it was not the last architectural curiousity. Perhaps "We won't go to live in town" is some kind of metaphor for conformity. Perhaps it's the former occupants way of saying "We won't conform. If you want a coffee and you're watching TV, you'll have to get up, go up a flight of stairs, down another flight of stairs, and there you'll find a kitchen. Then when you make your coffee, do it all over again to get back to the TV."
Thats a shit metaphor.
This rooms pretty cool though.
This TV guide is dated August 11-17, but doesn't specify a year. However a quick google of some of the headlines showed me that the character "Ivy" left Coronation Street in 1995, whereas the earliest point before that where a week fell from start to finish on August 11-17 was 1990. Of course, not being someone who actually watches TV, I don't know if the TV times format starts on Saturday or Monday. If it starts on Monday, then the next possible date for this magazine is 1986.
I'm also incredibly ashamed of myself for putting so much detective work into dating a copy of TV times. However, this does give us some vague indication of when the house was last occupied.
There's a downstairs toilet here, which is looking quite gloomy, but not as bad as the toilets in some pubs and clubs.
Making my way back upstairs, I came across something peculiar. There's a super narrow door built into the side of the stairway, which leads to a bathroom, with an ensuite bedroom. This is delightfully eccentric, as it's usually the other way around. An ensuite bathroom in a bedroom isn't unusual at all, but now someone might get out of bed, and walk past someone taking a dump in order to get downstairs for their morning coffee.
And then back upstairs and downstairs again to get to the lounge.
Whatever the architect who designed this house was taking, I want some.
The toilet still has toilet roll, and the ensuite bedroom has a fireplace.
This room has some shelves built into the wall, but it looks really crudely done.
There's also a window overlooking the stairs.
In the final upstairs room, there was this tiny bottle on the fireplace.
Is it absinthe? Is it shampoo? Is it ectoplasm? I guess the best way to find out is to take a sip, which I'm not about to do.
Onto the cellar. It's fairly non-descript down here.
There's a weird toy horse down here, lacking its front legs, but thats it.
I don't know much about this house. I wasn't able to find out what its story is, or why it's been left to crumble away, but that's the brilliant contrast in what I do. Sometimes the beauty is in uncovering the history, such as the derelict museum that I explored, and sometimes the mystery is the intriguing part. Why would someone take the time to write "We won't go to live in town" in large letters on the side of a house in a tiny hamlet?
This house didn't have a lot in it, indicative that the occupants moved out peacefully, no doubt even further from a town, but who knows? But as such, I decided to throw in a second house that I went to on that day, which did still have forgotten items left inside. Let's take a look!
This house was also looking a bit run down in 2009, and unchanged by 2015. Victorian maps show that it was a farm once, and it certainly seems to have once been a family home, but it's been derelict for quite some time.
There's a dog kennel here, perhaps more structurally intact than the actual house.
In the garage were loads of abandoned vehicles, slowly being claimed by the elements. The fact that some of the dirt had been doodled on was indicative of some previous visits from urban explorers.
Slipping inside was easy, as some of the windows have been completely obliterated. I want to emphasise, since this was once someones home and still contains personal belongings, that entry was never forced, and we always respect what we find, document it for historic value, and move on. It's likely that whoever lived here is dead, but we don't know for sure. But the only way to stop time is with a camera, and long after this house is gone, its memories will still be here.
Here's a "county training" folder from 2002. County Training is basically where they'd send unemployed people if they'd been unemployed for too long, where they would be helped to find employment. It's a largely demeaning process today, but things look like they might have been different in 2002. Now, I was still meandering around the education system in 2002, so I don't know for sure, but it looks like County Training got this woman doing a Catering and Hospitality course, perhaps as part of getting her into work.
See, that's great. By the time I was old enough to be unemployed, County Training was basically getting a bunch of unemployed people in a room full of computers and letting them search for jobs online from 9 to 5. It wasn't particularly useful. As an unemployed person, I was just doing there what I would be doing at home, except now I got to do it while being supervised in a room full of other unemployed drudgeons.
Now, I've been in full time employment for a number of years and don't plan on going back, because earning a living is great. But I do have a many funny stories regarding county training. Most of them involve me being a rebellious little shit.
I'm not the same person I was in 2012 though. I was only unemployed because people told me that stripping on webcam wasn't a real job! But people grow.
But I digress!
There's some dog leads here.
However, by far the coolest thing in the building, or in any derelict building for that matter, was this Cola Can Hi-Fi.
Seriously, this thing is bloody awesome! I want one!
The lounge was a mess, but not without its little tidbits of interest. In particular, above the fireplace.
There's a creepy bird here.
Above the fireplace are some dominoes trophies, but above that on the wall were hundreds of little bits of graffiti, scribbled there by the past occupants of this house, in awesome rhyming banter.
"Lorna is bonkers, I'd like to hit her with conkers, She really is very ugly, while I am very lovely, She smells of funny things, but not of ____, unlike Gill."
It looks like one of the words towards the end was smudged out.
Hel smells fishy! And Gill stinks!
Gill sure is getting burned today! Based on the graffiti, I realised that Hel was short for Helena, and that she smells fishy, not the biblical Hell, although I'm sure that smells fishy too.
Lorna is a fat moose!
"Helena Jane had a pain, she sat on the throne, to ease her groaning,"
And I can't make out all of the text, but it seems to be about Helena and her constipation. It uses the term "Congealed lump" at the end there, which seems like awfully imaginative terminology for the girls who, I assume, were children when this was written.
"Helena is a silly moo."
I wonder what became of these people, and whether they're aware that their childhood wall scrawling remains in the old derelict house.
Some binoculars.
Upstairs, the bathroom is pretty cluttered with the girls old toys.
Likewise, the bedrooms are pretty samey.
It seems someone was collecting dolls in this magazine, and this one is still unopened.
There's a dolls house shower next to a wall fish.
And also, quite sadly, an old photo of the house when it was still being lived in.
Towards the back of the house, it becomes a lot more derelict, missing a floor in some places, but if one was to cross this death trap, they would come to another bathroom.
That's all I have for today.
To conclude, abandoned houses are always sad. I'm always baffled by what does get left behind though, and clearly this house contains many childhood memories. It's curious that the majority of the houses contents appear to belong to the children. Based purely on the county training folder, I estimate that they'd be in their thirties at least. I wonder if they want to come and collect their stuff, before this house gets widely known by the urban explorer community and trashed.
Next time, I'm writing about another nuclear bunker, and then at long last, I will be blogging about Denbigh Mental Asylum on my other blog. In the meantime, follow my Instagram, like my Facebook, follow my Twitter and subscribe to my Youtube.
Thanks for reading!
