Over the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in forgotten, decaying and officially inaccessible architecture. Its appeal is widespread, and a flood of blogs, books and films portraying and documenting ‘ruin porn’ and urban exploration has hit us. However, these media often exhibit overexposed ruinous eye candy, frequently glorifying the adventurous nature of exploration. Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City does not entirely leave these ingredients out, but by adding cultural and political analysis, Bradley Garrett has delivered a comprehensive investigation and reflection of urban exploration.

The author became part of the London Consolidation Crew – an urban exploration collective (known from climbing London’s unfinished Shard, or more recently, from getting busted after trying to get to all the ghost stations of London’s tube) – as part of his ethnographic research at the University of Oxford. We have invited him to several of our Failed Architecture events in Amsterdam, but he was repeatedly unable to come as he was awaiting trial and the police had confiscated his passport (the result of the ‘holy grail’ trail into the London Underground ghost stations, which is also vividly described in the book).

‘Hero shot’. Down Street Disused Station, Picadilly Line, West London. ©Bradley Garrett

With his crew, he accessed numerous hidden and officially restricted places, many of them described and visualised in the book. Explore Everything is not your average report of trespassing and urban decay, or a frivolous collection of ruin porn; instead, it reads like you are inside a road movie while at the same time being taught about the political and cultural aspects of the built environment.

The book describes how Garrett became part of the urban exploration scene and what its actions, attractions, culture and codes are like. The ethnographic participatory research he conducted is delivered in a storytelling way, portraying the tribal dynamics of the UE scene. Often, he refers to the Situationists when explaining how urban exploration counters the passive nature of the contemporary city, which is characterized by securitization and distraction, and how explorers move from looking at the city towards creating an active relationship with it that is not scripted. Explorers (similar to street artists, skateboarders and parkourists) de-programme the sanctioned environment and reveal authentic experiences from under the spectacle of the city, not seeing the urban experience as a collection of sites to be seen, but as a set of places to be touched.....Continue Reading

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