I'm doing a local blog for the first time in what feels like forever. I want to start tying up some loose ends around Shrewsbury and wider Shropshire, looking at all the little stuff that I've known about but have been ignoring in favour of my travel blog, where I've been checking out old manors and abandoned cinemas with some fantastic stories behind them.
This house is a short walk from mine, but in all honesty it doesn't look all that exciting. It's not an old building, and it's residential. So while I can't find much in the way of history, I doubt it's going to be the sort of epic saga that I've covered in my blogs before. This was lived in my normal people like you and me. Well, maybe not me. I looked at some street view shots from 2011, and it does look like it was once a nice home. There's a couple of children's bikes in the garden, and a car in the driveway, and it actually looks like someone cares about it. I'd love to know how it ended up like this in the space of a decade, but I can't find anything.
Someone had torn a wooden board off the window, allowing access. There's a sign warning of anti-climb paint, and it's slathered everywhere, which means I'm going to end up black and sticky, but hey-ho. Let's slip inside!
So this is the front door. As you can see, this place has been well and truly ransacked. What was once probably a nice home has now become a magnet for vandals, crackheads, bored teenagers, and adult manlets who still think smashing stuff is funny. It's sad to see, but not surprising. We're not exactly out in the sticks here.
Here we have the kitchen, which is totally smashed.
The pantry shelves are still mostly functional. I can relate.
At the back of the kitchen is the room where the washing machine would have been.
There's a little back toilet too.
And a coal room, which is interesting. At first glance this house looked a little too modern for this sort of thing. Nobody has a fireplace anymore. We had a fireplace in my childhood home, but that was a big old Victorian thing with a huge fireplace. The one here is pretty diddy.
I assume this was the lounge. It's pretty cool. I can see it being quite homely if it wasn't one fart away from collapsing on my head.
And over there in the background is the staircase, leading up to what I assume will be similarly trashed bedrooms.
This room is painted blue, and I assume it once belonged to one of the children. It seems to have become the focal point of the graffiti.
I must admit, I did smile at the simplistic smiley face being labeled as art.
There's a door propped up against the wall, and it's got these little stickers on it. These must be from when the family lived here. It's not much but it's nice that there's something among the carnage that gives us a glimpse of the houses time as a family home.
And then we have this room, where some graffiti says "Look up." And then on the ceiling, it says I'm a gullible twat.
Sorry, I meant "Gullioble." My bad.
This is amusing only in that it's misused the word "gullible" entirely. But I get what this strange human is trying to do. It's meant to be the old joke of telling someone that "Gullible" is written on the ceiling, and then they look up and nothing is there. Because gullibility is believing shit that obviously isn't real.
Sort of like when people give their bank details to "Princess Masuwerteng" who promises that you can have a percentage of her millions once your money ensures that she makes it out of her war-torn country safely.
Or when some weird media article ends up on Facebook saying "Young people are saying Santa Claus should be a woman," and then all the grumpy people, rather than, heaven forbid, actually talking to young people to hear their views, just have tantrums in the Facebook comments, helping the article float up the algorithm, getting clicks and ad revenue at the expense of their weird feelings.
But what we have here in this room, telling me to look up and then giving me something to look at when I do, is not gullibility. What you've done is you've set expectations and then delivered. That's not me being gullible, it's you keeping a promise.
How does this need explaining? You all have google!
In another bedroom it's obvious that someone tried to burn this house down at some point.
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And as an urbexer I generally hate arson. I've seen it ruin loads of amazing places. I highly doubt any urbexer would consider this place amazing, but nonetheless it's a shitty thing to do.
Here's some graffiti porn. I'm glad someone is getting laid, because whoever tried to burn this place down sure isn't.
Now onto the best part of any abandoned building, the bathroom!
Still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.
This might actually be a first. I don't think I've ever seen an abandoned place where the toilet bowl itself is completely shattered, but the seat is somehow still attached. How has that even happened? Usually the seat is the first to go! So it's still possible to sit on this toilet, as long as you barely weigh anything.
And that's all I've got for this place. It wasn't much, but I wasn't expecting much. That's why it's been on my radar for years but I've never actually gone there until now. But this house does mark the return of my attention to the Shrewsbury blog, as we begin "Loose End Season." I'm going to focus a lot more on my local area, checking out all the things that I should have done years ago but for some reason haven't got around to doing. I can promise you now, they'll probably all be better than this.
But admittedly I do feel a little bad for those who followed me for local stuff at first, because I've been gallivanting around the world on my travel blog. Make no mistake, I've been to some incredible places and dug up some fascinating history, but there's no place like home.
And as bland as this place looks, it's still sad to see because it was someones home once. This is the focal point of someones childhood memories, wherever the fuck they are now. And while houses are considered the "low hanging fruit" of urbex, at least among those of us who have abseiled down mine shafts and swam out to shipwrecks, getting pleasure from destroying someones home is lower still.
So after all that rambling about focusing on my local blog, I should probably point out that my next two blogs will be on the travel blog anyway. I have a fancy pub that I really want to write about, and a magistrates court. But a load of Shropshire stuff is coming up at some point after that. In the meantime, in order to get updates, it's probably best to follow my social media stuff. My last blog was actually banned on Facebook so be sure to follow me on stuff like Instagram, Threads, Vero and Reddit. Follow my Facebook anyway just in case it actually decides to function correctly, and if you really, really want to, follow me on Twitter.
Thanks for reading!
