“The community has changed drastically,” says Bradley Garrett, author of Explore Everything: Place-hacking the City. “A lot of these kids are putting themselves at greater risk to gain credibility on social media channels. There have been an increased number of deaths in the urbex community worldwide in the past few years, and that’s gone hand-in-hand with the increased desire to publish these exploits on social media.” ... “Exploring the city gives you a chance to understand it in a different way,” Garrett tells me. “You are able to see the abandoned buildings, the infrastructural systems, the construction sites, all the things that comprise the city. There’s an addictive quality to it, because once you start going into these spaces and understanding the city in a different way, it’s very hard to fall back into normal rhythms.”

Garrett talks about the “personal sense of empowerment” urban exploration provides. “There’s a very particular kind of agency that comes from using the body to get into spaces that you’re not supposed to access,” he says, “and that translates very easily into a kind of politics.”

This breaking into closed-off spaces isn’t an explicitly political act – there is usually no attempt to change anything specific – but in an over-regulated, over-securitised world, it feels like a way of kicking against the system.

It’s also fraught with difficulty and danger. In 2012, Garrett and several fellow explorers were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage. “They didn’t have any evidence that we had committed any criminal damage, so they charged us with a thought crime,” he says. The case dragged on for two years, and he was eventually given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay costs of £2,000. 

“When I reflect on the whole process,” he says now, “I realise that the trauma we were subjected to was actually the point. What the British Transport police wanted to do was stop me from publishing photos [of the sites visited] and stop me from writing about this thing, because what we did undermined their narrative of security.” Garrett had demonstrated that the secret, impenetrable world was not so secret or impenetrable after all.

...

Jed Craine, a 27-year-old Londoner who says he has been an urban explorer since his early teens, gives me a somewhat less politicised view. He grew up near a closed Victorian asylum in south London, and used to enjoy sneaking in with his mates. As he got older, he added layers of planning to every operation. ... Craine is sceptical about the political dimension Garrett claims for urban exploration. “I mainly do it because it’s fun,” he says. “It’s no more politically motivated than any other hobby, except that the people who engage in it are more willing to break the law.”

In any case, he says, it is possible to see many of these locations on private tours – that is the whole idea of Open House, to give the public access to the usually inaccessible – but the urban explorer wants access on his own terms. If he or she does get access, they may well want to keep it to themselves.

“There are places people have accessed but they’ve never posted the photographs online, “ Craine says, “not only because the legal repercussions could be severe, but also because if anyone else knows those places are accessible that could heat the place up. Very few people are really trying to publicise these places.”

Craine goes exploring at least one night a week. He says construction sites are usually easy, but other locations are very tricky and need a lot of reconnaissance – and perhaps a few failed attempts – before you work out how to get in. He doesn’t like to go out in a group of more than three: any more would be too visible, too unwieldy.

Like Garrett, he is wary of the “new generation of kids” who explore in order to post pictures on Instagram and build up their online celebrity. “I don’t think they’re bothered about the challenge of getting into these places, or take an interest in the history of who built this tunnel and why. For them it’s: ‘Go in there, get this picture and leave.’ They just want to rack up likes and followers. Increasingly it’s more about the image, while the experience takes a back seat.”