Where refrigerators come to die

A few weeks ago I had nothing to do for a weekend afternoon, so instead of spending it inside the house I arranged to hang out with a friend. He was fascinated with decay and rust so I decided to take him to a beach that I had told him about, one where it seemed that refrigerators came to die.

The beach in question backed out onto a steel works, a power station and a rough housing estate and so the area itself was filled with rubbish, twisted bits of metal, tires, sheets of cloth and concrete. But what was ugly about it was also extremely beautiful.

The decaying beauty along with a cloudy dramatic sky gave the whole area a apocalyptic feel and made each object seem sad and strangely person like. As if they had come to that beach in order to find a place at the ends of the earth as their final resting places.

We spent the day there before climbing the nearby hill to take in the afternoon sun casting spears of light upon the city of Cardiff.

As we left we came upon some European truckers who said they wanted to show us something. At first I was a bit nervous but once we got shaking hands and chatting it turned out they had seen my camera and wanted to show me something. They had been parking trucks near the steel works overnight but when they did so they had found that the trucks had been repeatedly vandalised costing them alot of their livelihoods in petrol. These friendly people had just wanted to point this out to me in the hopes that someone would tell their story. Hopefully that way they would get someone to install a security camera where they parked. I promised them I would so the last photo of these is me fulfilling that promise.

I was glad I had come to this strange place, to the beach where refrigerators come to die.

The colours of decay

For me autumn is a time for the beautiful and slow creep of decay as the season ticks slowly over into the depths of winter. The leaves change colour and sweep off the trees, the air becomes crisp and cold and wind and rain lash member of the public poor enough to be caught without an umbrella on their commute to work.

It was this sense of colourful decay that I set out to capture with my camera today. At first I was setting out to capture the changing of the season through the subtle shift of nature in the urban world, but as usually when I actually got halfway through taking pictures the emphesis had begun to change.

I grew fascinated by the disintegrating posters that had peeled away to leave layers of vibrate colour behind, the rusted garage doors now covered in metallic street art and the vibrate graffiti scrawled over the streets of Cardiff.

Entropy had caused the world to drip and melt with a rainbow of hues and shades. And what I had come out to photograph had changed, instead of the natural oncoming of autumn I had caught instead the urban world's vibrate colours of decay.

Urban exploration: The house of metal and flame

On the February of this year the area of Splott was host to one of the worst blazes the area has seen in years. The building in question was a disused bingo hall based on Pearl Street  That day the whole street was shut down as firefighters fought to tackle the inferno.

Residents were told to stay indoors for the whole day and even by the time I got home late that night the firemen where still containing the fire that remained and my clothes became saturated with the heavy smell of smoke.

The result was that the fire was contained and thankfully no one was hurt. What was left behind however was a tangled mass of metal, debris and wood that was as a photographer truly irresistible to me.

The way to the building has been blocked but by finding a chink in the fencing I was able to slip inside and (carefully) snap away. What was revealed to me was fiery colours, alien shapes and partially hollowed out walls which created a strange impression. A house built of metal and flame.

Industrial revolution

After having moved to a less then salubrious area of Cardiff, I discovered to my delight that I was right round the corner from an industrial estate. I had made a mental note to explore it and so as the sun was setting I made my way to the grounds and began to explore.

I discovered damaged gates, rusting metal, barbed wires and electrical cables and all around it the surge of nature, an unruly tide threatening to swallow everything in its path in its quest to reclaim the land that man had taken from it.

It is these places that I love the most. Forgotten, decaying and being slowly retaken by the greenery that begins its eventable creep inwards.

It also offers fantastic opportunities for photographers, filled as it is with details, wonderful colours and dramatic shadows against the sky and it shows that for a photographer anything, even something that can be as ugly as an industry estate can be remade into something that is colourful and beautiful.