Why did you get into urban exploration? It was something I had been doing when I grew up in Los Angeles. I was always driving out into Mojave desert to find old buildings and ruins. My master’s degree is in archeology. That tied into it—I was interested in the history of places, in what you find when you excavate, physically and figuratively. So when I came out here to do my PhD, I had an idea of doing a project on alternative archeologies. I was going to look at people who were experiencing the history of places, or doing their own archeology to learn about places. When I ran into urban explorers, they were going to be one of my case studies. I realized I was on the cusp of something that was really beginning to take hold, so I wrote it out. Since I’ve done this ethnography, most of my friends are now explorers and I’m so embedded in the group. When I came back from LA last week, they threw a surprise party for me in a utility tunnel underneath London and we had 30 people under there and they’d wired speaker systems into the wires under the utility tunnel and we had a massive party under there. If you’ve done ethnography right, in the end, those people should be friends for life. That’s the way it should work. We shouldn’t parachute in, get our stuff, and fuck off with it. But urban exploration is so much a part of who I am as a person now that I’ll never be able to separate myself from it as a person again. Also doing this completely changes your view of the city. Once you know there are utility tunnels and bunkers and tunnels underneath you, and once you know you can climb cranes in the city and get into particular buildings, it completely changes your gaze. My brain has been rewired from exploring so much.
You’ve been detained by the British equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security for being caught with old mail carts—what happened there? I should probably start with giving you some background on our urban exploration crew and the stuff we’ve been up to here. Basically, about three years ago, I hooked up with this crew called London Team B. There were three crews operating in the city—Team A, Team B and Team C. I hooked up with Team B because they seemed like cool people and we started exploring derelict buildings—going out to abandoned asylums and old factories. Eventually we took road trips into continental Europe and were doing what we called urban camping. When we came back to London, we started climbing cranes, going into the sewer networks, going into the utility network, into government tunnels under the city and eventually, as we were doing that, we realized that the Tube had a whole bunch of abandoned stations where they had rerouted a line and so you’d have this platform but trains don’t go there anymore. And you had a couple of platforms where trains just pass through. So for about two years, we’ve been systematically exploring every one of those stations—sitting down with maps, going down on a live platform and going off the end in between trains so we have the two minutes between trains to make it to the next platform or we get smacked. So there was this increasing excitement about the possibilities of what we could explore here, but also the increased, very real possibility of some of us dying doin this and it all became very intense. During that whole thing, we found out that there was this other underground system called the Mail Rail that the post office had built to transport mail across the city. It’s a tiny Tube, little tiny tunnels with little tiny trains called mini-Yorks they use to transport mail across the city. We spent ages trying to figure out how to get into this thing, and eventually we did. That was probably one of our best discoveries in the city, but because of that, we were pushing things really hard here. On Easter, a couple of the guys were going to find the last unexplored station underneath the British Museum, and they got busted. Someone saw them on a camera, running through a station, and the British Transport police swooped in and arrested everybody, and it was a real game-changer.
