I have a feeling everybody's got a lowkey on-face-value-not-very-interesting favourite abandoned place they could talk about for hours to largely confused ears.
After being abroad for the last 3 weeks and getting ever so slightly homesick for Blighty, I'll run my mouth on one such place.
I must start by stating the blatant fact that this motive is not a huge hospital, or bunker, or power plant or factory... at the end of the day, it is merely a load of barely relatable stone ruins on some agricultural marshland.
But yet, it's so much more.
Our infatuation with 'Zona', as the homies and I affectionately call it, may well have begun for several reasons; perhaps because the first Zona day out came to be because we just spotted some odd looking shapes on google maps satellite, or perhaps because the weather was one of those super rare and awe inspiring red sky, rainbow, foggy, noctilucent clouds weather situations, or perhaps that the environment as a whole reminded us so uncannily of a Tarkovsky film set... But it was something of a religious experience for a hardline atheist.
To try and best exemplify why I'm getting so emotional about somewhere that was abandoned in 1921... Please refer to the below link, which I feel best shares the vibe Zona can give to a wayfarer.
https://coub.com/view/nyl0r
In further detail, Zona is the remains of a family-business munitions factory. Indeed with this knowledge, it becomes possible to still trace the structures in Zona to their respective roles in the process; from Cordite loading bays to packaging warehouses, the reception/homestead to the pillars that held up a gas pipelin, the sense of standing in these structures bears with it a greater eeriness still.
https://coub.com/view/rzo0c
Seeing little use for the facilities after the war, either the Kent authorities or the Harvey and Curtis company themselves closed it in 1921, for a possible two reasons. Either profit was unsustainable in peacetime, or a darker series of events led to its closure. In 1921 the site had overseen some total 16 staff fatalities, some in their teens, at the hands of chemical explosions. If your father or husband worked at Zona, he wouldn't certainly be coming home for dinner.
Dark history aside, as Zona is such an outdoor and physical geography-dominated experience, the seasons take on new importance to a visitor.
Every month will present a new intruige from the wildlife; a Canada goose egg, a fresh sheep carcass, new spawn in the rivers, a new avian inhabitant nesting in the caravan. Container ships not a few hundred metres away are always cruising out to Shanghai, Lagos, Suez, Singapore. Arguably, Autumn brings out the best colours in Zona. In full summer sunshine, it can feel like the garden of Eden, in bleak overcast and haze, it'll bring a forlorn, very romantic last person on earth vibe to all senses. The marshland contains dozens of little streams with extremely limited crossing points. These streams also play tricks on the eye - sometimes you can't see them until they're right at your feet, so if a thick fog starts to roll in, you better boost out of there real quick. Apparently private land, signs of human life across the vast expanse are blue moons.
https://coub.com/view/u84h9
Besides decaying or alive fauna and fatally hazardous industrial units from over a century ago;
a lonely caravan, whose calendar lies on the year 2008, and countless completely random and inexplicable tiny artificial furrows and kilns, are amongst other curiosities within Zona.
Zona is an actively changing ecosystem. Cows and horses move through from brook/stream-engineered 'enclosure' to 'enclosure', and the few shreds of what one could acceptably calls roofs remaining are all ripe for collapse - evidence of said process is available for all to see after 4 years of seshing. As Zona comes up to its centennial anniversary of abandonment, nature is beautifully disintegrating what's left of the munitions factory at molecular level on some of the Thames Estuary's most picturesque marshland for any visitor to bask in for themselves. But if it starts raining, there's just one little hut that so happened to stumble upon a corrugated roof for itself to take shelter in.
P.S. If anybody takes a visit to this patch of marshland, be sure to look out for the house name plaque of one of the bungalows on Pond Hill (on the right just before the dirt track leading to the ruins) - reading 'ZONA', and watch Tarkovsky's Stalker to contrast the location in the film and that which you will find on the marshland. Just an unreal (or not) coincidence!!
Best regards
O
After being abroad for the last 3 weeks and getting ever so slightly homesick for Blighty, I'll run my mouth on one such place.
I must start by stating the blatant fact that this motive is not a huge hospital, or bunker, or power plant or factory... at the end of the day, it is merely a load of barely relatable stone ruins on some agricultural marshland.
But yet, it's so much more.
Our infatuation with 'Zona', as the homies and I affectionately call it, may well have begun for several reasons; perhaps because the first Zona day out came to be because we just spotted some odd looking shapes on google maps satellite, or perhaps because the weather was one of those super rare and awe inspiring red sky, rainbow, foggy, noctilucent clouds weather situations, or perhaps that the environment as a whole reminded us so uncannily of a Tarkovsky film set... But it was something of a religious experience for a hardline atheist.
To try and best exemplify why I'm getting so emotional about somewhere that was abandoned in 1921... Please refer to the below link, which I feel best shares the vibe Zona can give to a wayfarer.
https://coub.com/view/nyl0r
In further detail, Zona is the remains of a family-business munitions factory. Indeed with this knowledge, it becomes possible to still trace the structures in Zona to their respective roles in the process; from Cordite loading bays to packaging warehouses, the reception/homestead to the pillars that held up a gas pipelin, the sense of standing in these structures bears with it a greater eeriness still.
https://coub.com/view/rzo0c
Seeing little use for the facilities after the war, either the Kent authorities or the Harvey and Curtis company themselves closed it in 1921, for a possible two reasons. Either profit was unsustainable in peacetime, or a darker series of events led to its closure. In 1921 the site had overseen some total 16 staff fatalities, some in their teens, at the hands of chemical explosions. If your father or husband worked at Zona, he wouldn't certainly be coming home for dinner.
Dark history aside, as Zona is such an outdoor and physical geography-dominated experience, the seasons take on new importance to a visitor.
Every month will present a new intruige from the wildlife; a Canada goose egg, a fresh sheep carcass, new spawn in the rivers, a new avian inhabitant nesting in the caravan. Container ships not a few hundred metres away are always cruising out to Shanghai, Lagos, Suez, Singapore. Arguably, Autumn brings out the best colours in Zona. In full summer sunshine, it can feel like the garden of Eden, in bleak overcast and haze, it'll bring a forlorn, very romantic last person on earth vibe to all senses. The marshland contains dozens of little streams with extremely limited crossing points. These streams also play tricks on the eye - sometimes you can't see them until they're right at your feet, so if a thick fog starts to roll in, you better boost out of there real quick. Apparently private land, signs of human life across the vast expanse are blue moons.
https://coub.com/view/u84h9
Besides decaying or alive fauna and fatally hazardous industrial units from over a century ago;
a lonely caravan, whose calendar lies on the year 2008, and countless completely random and inexplicable tiny artificial furrows and kilns, are amongst other curiosities within Zona.
Zona is an actively changing ecosystem. Cows and horses move through from brook/stream-engineered 'enclosure' to 'enclosure', and the few shreds of what one could acceptably calls roofs remaining are all ripe for collapse - evidence of said process is available for all to see after 4 years of seshing. As Zona comes up to its centennial anniversary of abandonment, nature is beautifully disintegrating what's left of the munitions factory at molecular level on some of the Thames Estuary's most picturesque marshland for any visitor to bask in for themselves. But if it starts raining, there's just one little hut that so happened to stumble upon a corrugated roof for itself to take shelter in.
P.S. If anybody takes a visit to this patch of marshland, be sure to look out for the house name plaque of one of the bungalows on Pond Hill (on the right just before the dirt track leading to the ruins) - reading 'ZONA', and watch Tarkovsky's Stalker to contrast the location in the film and that which you will find on the marshland. Just an unreal (or not) coincidence!!
Best regards
O
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