Today I'm continuing "Loose End Season" after a brief jolly up north looking at awesome stuff on the travel blog. I'm focusing a lot on that one lately, and I've got some great stuff coming up, but I also have a lot of stuff that's local to me that isn't particularly exciting that I've been quietly ignoring until there's too much clutter on my map for me to justify not visiting. This one is an admittedly dull-looking house, so I'm not exactly ecstatic. There is, simply put, no story to be had here. I'll never understand why people post houses on the urbex groups and say "I can't find the history of this place." Well of course you can't. This place was lived in by an ordinary bunch of people, and it's probably empty because someone died. There's no stellar saga of derring-do. Unfortunately that means there's nothing for me to prattle about, not that it will stop me trying. Meanwhile, if you do like actual history, then check out my travel blog. I just did a big gorgeous abandoned synagogue, and it was awesome.
If you just want a quick mooch around a trashed abandoned house and can't be bothered to just trash your own house and look at that, then I'm here for you too.
Curiously in the garden we have the top of a vehicle.
And here's the titular trampoline, looking delightfully ominous in a sea of nettles. It's falling apart but probably has a few more bounces left in it for those who want to take the risk. Personally I don't.
I say "titular trampoline," in regards to this blog, because I don't know what the wider urbex scene call this place. Probably something unimaginative like "Curtains Manor" or something. Anyway,let's slip inside the house!
As I've mentioned countless times before, as intriguing and mysterious as abandoned houses are, they are usually abandoned due to a former occupant dying. Visiting them is a bit like visiting a memorial to their entire life, and as such abandoned houses should be treated with the deepest of respect.
Alas, they never are. That's where this whole urbex thing falls down, of course. Take nothing but pictures, my arse! There's a reason why people will ignore a grand, empty mansion with a fantastic history but scream like they're being castrated with a cheese grater if you won't hand over the location of a fully furnished soggy cottage. Houses are mainly only popular with urbexers because they're a minimum effort way to make a quick buck on Ebay. There's not really much I can do to stop that. But I can at least make sure I'm not part of the problem.
The first thing we see when we slip inside is this rather garish kitchen area.
One thing I've learned is never look in the fridge of an abandoned house. It's tempting, but everyone always regrets it.
Following on from the kitchen is this rather trashed room with a smashed window, a creepy curtain and a filing cabinet for some reason. The place was a farm, so I guess there is the business aspect to consider.
There's a fireplace which still has some fire wood and the poker thingie, which is great. I think I've said it before, but I always get nostalgic about fireplaces, because the house I grew up in had a big mighty one, and nowhere I've ever lived as an adult has ever had one. I guess that drug den in Oswestry where I sofa-surfed for a few months when I was homeless did have a fire, but that was in the backyard whenever it came time for other residents to dispose of "evidence," so it doesn't count.
I'm trying to look at the clutter in here to get an idea of how long this place has been empty for. Everything looks disappointingly modern. I think an abandoned house is much cooler when everything in it is an artifact from at least as far back as the 1980s. People use the term "time capsule" when describing a furnished abandoned house, even if it was abandoned less than a decade ago, and to me that just seems silly. Let's take a step back in time to see how people lived in the far flung era of... 2014!
Shit, that's when I started this blog. I can't believe it's been that long. I guess I'm not going to grow up, after all.
This place isn't really furnished. All the furniture has gone, and it looks like some attempt was made to pack up everything else, but then it was stopped and the house was subsequently looted.
I like this fireplace.
I've censored the names on this school book, but it's for GCSE Maths, which would suggest that the children that lived here at least made it to their mid-late teenage years before the house was left.
But now onto the best part of any abandoned building, the bathroom!
Shit, is that a drill? Well I guess that's one way to unblock the loo.
Still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.
It's time to slip upstairs.
I do like the colour scheme here. It's very quaint and homely.
At the top of the stairs, we have three doors. The parents had one room, and their children, a boy and a girl, had the others.
This adds to the intrigue about this place. Usually abandoned houses were occupied by some old person who passed away, and they had nobody to take care of their things. This place was lived in by a family. Surely someone still exists who should be taking care of it.
We'll start with the adults bedroom, which is cluttered with half-packed boxes and half-ransacked bits and bobs.
Again, love the fireplace.
There are toys that I assume belonged to the girl that lived here.
Moving on to the boys bedroom...
Likewise with the other room, it's all semi-packed but largely looted. Stuff has been strewn everywhere.
There's still a sports trophy and a picture above the mantelpiece, which is nice.
I absolutely fucking love that there are still darts in the dartboard. These were the former occupants last throws, preserved here for years after he left.
Stuck to the ceiling are a bunch of maps of skiing trails, which indicates that this family are well-traveled and pretty active.
And over on the wall is a cycling poster, indicating that they had their fingers in quite a few sporty pies, aside from the skiing. There's a farm poster, which makes sense. This is a farm, after all. And there's a calendar dated 2010.
So yeah, it's not really old enough to be considered a time capsule, but it's still been empty long enough for me to wonder why the fuck nobody has been to clear it all up.
The kid liked painting model aircraft.
But underneath that we have action figures from Spider-Man 2! This movie came out in 2004.
We have another calendar dated 2013. Why does this kid have two calendars for different years???
But hang on, what's this?
Why is this drawing of Optimus Prime labeled Megatron??? That's practically blasphemy.
Here's a doodle from 2012, which is quite adorable.
There's a collection of football cards.
And look! Old money! Guest starring my friends hand.
Onto the girls room!
I love the colour scheme in this room. It sort of reminds me of bubblegum-flavoured sweets. It's by far the most interesting room in the building, aesthetically speaking.
I'm pretty sure the girl was younger than the boy, purely based on the age demographic of the toys, and the fact that the boy had the bigger room with the double bed. But this playset, while aimed at a younger child, came out in 1988. I love vintage toys, but I think it's great that this one, clearly handed down to the girl from a previous owner, continued getting played with.
All these old doodles are pretty adorable.
The door to this room is positively slathered in stickers, and it's mostly skiing related, with a few cycle ones thrown in for good measure.
Evidently this family was pretty damn active, and I'm kinda envious.
But that's it for the house, really. There's one last stop, and that's the barn!
I think I actually like it more than the house.
And here we have a dead sheep. In fact we have pretty much the entire skeleton strewn among the floor of the barn. No doubt it came in here and died, and then its body was ripped apart by other animals.
So that's all I've got. The house is tiny and rural, and quite frankly as far as urbex goes it's a bit shit. Even so, I can't help but find it endearing, with its colour scheme, the leftover trinkets, and the clues about the people who once inhabited it. I'm not saying it's good, just that I like it. These two things rarely coincide.
It hasn't got much going for it, but it does have character.
My next two blogs will be continuing "Loose End Season" with a folly, and then heading out to Wales on the travel one. They'll be pretty small but I'm looking forward to it.
In the meantime, if this is the first time you've ever seen my blog then I promise you, I do better places and better write-ups, so stick around. To get regular-ish updates, try your luck with the algorithmic hellscapes that are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, and the less-evil ones, Vero and Reddit.
Thanks for reading!
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