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.

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.