2008 Trip

For a long time now Shoreham cement has been on the husk of a planning permission commitee. Shorehams owners planned to redevelop the site and eventually reopen it sometime in 2010. Now I dont know anything about the cement industry, but from what ive seen from some of the sites in london that take up less then 1/8th of shorehams size and still perform the same task, surley it would be easier and cheaper just to demolish the entire site and build a new one on top of it?.

In the 2-3 years its been since my last visit the site has become even worse. Every single walkway, platform, support and machine is covered in rust, presumably beyond repair, but the owners must have a plan, right?.

I had some free time in the week so I headed down with Site (AKA Garyface). As we arrived we were disappointed to find the site was crawling with builders. Crap. Now I had been driving for an hour to get here so I wasn't ready to give up without a fight. We headed over the fence and down towards the nearest building, just as a door opened and a worker came out right in front of us. We dived into a nearby bush and prayed we hadn't been seen. We stayed down for a few minutes until the worker drove off round the corner in his truck.

We made a break for the building again and ran straight into a room with no way out. Damn, try the next one?, blocked, next one?, also blocked. As we entered the next room we heard the rumbling of a truck coming towards us so with nowhere else to go we squeezed through a letterbox sized window covered in broken glass and finally arrived in the main turbine room.

Now it might be because I have done some bigger sites since I last visited Shoreham, but my memories of the huge concrete supports holding up the large metal pipes were instantly shattered. They seemed a hell of a lot smaller at only 2 stories high. Nevertheless we were here now so we started taking pictures.

One of the main reasons I like shoreham is the graffiti that litters the site. Of course you still have your crap tags done by prepubescent kids trying to impress their local crew. But apart from that the rest have clearly had a lot of time and effort put into them, you could even call some of them "art". My favorite four being the following

Artwork 1 , Artwork 2 , Artwork 3 , Artwork 4

By now the workers had left for the day and we had been walking around the dusty buildings for almost 5 hours and I was about ready to go so we headed back out and over the fence.

As always a good trip at Shoreham but I cant help wonder how its future will pan out.

2005 Trip

After the mass Hellingly explore we all decided this would be the next course of action. Shoreham cement is huge, the buildings are very compact but there built upwards instead of outwards so the main turbines are 100 meters off the ground. Which is a scary experience if you walk along them.

Visited with too many people to name.

We arrived at the site just as the heavens opened up it was bucketing it down. We ran down the path, over the fence and into the main hulking building. Safe out of the rain. We met up with a few more explorers who arrived before us then began working our way up to the top.

We starting in the turbine room taking pictures of Turkey and Raddog walking along the turbines and then headed over to the other side to meet them. The walk was a bit dangerous as the walkways were rusted and some broke away under your foot. So we had to take our time crossing. Once over the other side we took a few pictures of the hop silos and then headed over into the crane room.

There wasnt much in here apart from the heavy loading crane which must have been at least 150 meters in the air. A few climbed down and into the cockpit, but that wasn't for me so I went upstairs and climbed to the flag mast. Up here you got good views of the site and also the bit over the road which the scum had moved into.

We headed back down and began to walk back downstairs when we were caught by a live in pikey and escorted off the site. he was clearly not in the mood for being messed around as he had been catching small groups of us all through the day and was growing tired of it. Haha. Oh well we had seen at least 80%. Good Trip.