The Police Station

(Disclaimer: Joking aside, I fully understand the risks/dangers involved in these adventures and do so in the full knowledge of what could happen. I don't encourage or condone and I accept no responsibility for anyone else following in my footsteps. I never break into a place, I never take any items and I never cause any damage, as such no criminal offences have been committed in the making of this blog. I will not disclose a location, or means of entry. I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building.)

Back when I first started blogging, I always wondered if my unconventional hobbies would take me into the heart of a police station. Of course, I assumed it would be in a different capacity.

Luckily, I have a relatively good relationship with my local constabulary. I've been quite transparent with them, rather than doing the typically expected thing and donning an Anonymous mask and prancing around in the night pretending to be some edgy outlaw, and blogging under a daft pseudonym like "Night Thrasher." Obviously, I do try not to get discovered, and obviously they still do their jobs and shoo me away if they find me, but most of them understand that I generally mean no harm in what I do, that I never force entry and that I don't damage or take anything, and that I'm only really a danger to myself. The police have also recently offered me advice regarding my slightly over-enthusiastic fan over in Oakengates, which was nice of them. I imagine if someone was to call them and say that there was a lunatic on a roof, it's probably a relief for them to get up there and find that it's only me, and not some tracksuit-clad hooligan throwing his or her faeces.

This particular police station was about to be demolished, and sure, it's a big ugly 1960s building with nowhere near as much history or character as some of the places I blog about, but it was still something that I wanted to document before it was gone forever.

Now, usually I try not to disclose locations in my blog, but I understand that this place has been demolished at the time of writing this, so I don't really feel the need to censor my images if they do give the location away. So if you do figure it out from the pictures, great detective work, Sherlock. Congratulations. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Slipping inside was pretty easy. In the years since this place closed, every window has been smashed, and every door has been kicked down, and as fast as they were all boarded up, they've been ripped down again. From what I've heard, the demolition of this building has been celebrated by the local community, due to it being such a magnet for local teenagers, homeless people, and thieves. As well as being vandalised, metal has been stolen and allegedly there was some arson, although it can't have been anything too dramatic, because there seems to be no hint of fire damage.

However, the police stations accessibility became widespread knowledge last year when teenagers were caught riding bikes on the roof.
And let's be honest, on top of being about as subtle as the holocaust, that sounds like way more trouble than it's worth. The elevators out, which means those teenagers had to lug their bikes up several flights of stairs, and for what? Five minutes of riding a bike before someone on ground level spotted them and called the police?

The media ran a few stories on it, which only glamourised the location more so, because that's how things like this work. That's why places like this are trashed after relatively recent closure in 2016, while places like the Cyclops Cavern suffer almost no vandalism in spite of having an additional two decades of neglect.
The second an abandoned or derelict place pops up in the paper, the people who do sneak into derelict or abandoned places are drawn there like a moth to a flame. Just look at me, for example.

Beyond the reception desk, the once-orderly rooms are trashed, sprawling out in a labyrinth of vandalised offices.

 The police station closed down in 2016, after allegedly serving the community for roughly fifty years. It's actually one of 27 police stations to close in recent years due to budget cuts. Since 2010, government funding has dropped by about £145 million, and consequentially West Midlands Police have lost around 2,300 police officers. Given that West Midlands Police cover an area with some 2.9 million inhabitants, that's pretty problematic, but that's what happens when you have a government as beneficial to the British people as a cheese grater up ones anus. If only voting wasn't just choosing the brand of lube...

Some police have actually admitted to the media that things are pretty grim on the funding side of things, and that the level of service provided is inadequate. It must be rather hard for them, having to do a job where lives are at stake with such stressful limitations, but then the same can be said for the hospitals, the care homes, and any other service thats criminally underfunded.

Here's some ominous graffiti.

A changing area.

 Because the building was a magnet for crime, news of its demolition was well recieved by the local community. However the lack of a local police station has been met with a little grumbling. In January the media mentioned that the area has seen an increase in criminals being let off the hook a little too easily, and while I'm fully aware that the mainstream media will take a couple of incidents and blow them out of proportion, this all seems to stem from the fact that with this police station closed, the next custody suite is some ten miles away. Detaining someone consequentially removes the overstretched police officers from their duty for an unacceptable period of time. A police officer is not going to fulfil their job role if they're stuck in traffic for ten miles. As such it's sadly more practical to give criminals a slap on the wrist and a telling off than it is to detain them. At least that way the police officer stays on duty as a crime deterrent.

The news article that I read also gave various testimonies from shopkeepers and business owners, who feel that they should give up on calling the police when they see shoplifters, and just tackle the issue themselves. The article was pretty damning, designed to make the police look incompetent, but that's not the case. The truth is, they're underfunded, and doing what they can.

 Oh look, it's that thing women never say to me.

Among the maze of offices, each corner on a hallway had a mirror, presumably for security reasons. Presumably if someone were to escape the custody suite they could easily use this labyrinth of narrow halls to stage an ambush or hide.

At least that's my best guess. I could be wrong. Maybe there was once a police officer who liked to jump out at his colleagues to make them scream, so the mirrors were put up to foil his incessant practical jokes.

In regards to the actual police force that operated here, it quite predictably predates the actual building, being formed in 1832, disposing of the earlier Watchmen. For those of you who don't know, Watchmen tended to be organised groups of men who provided the public services of crime prevention, fire fighting, and generic areas of public safety in the era before the formation of organised police forces. In the UK, Watchmen were first appointed in 1233, to quell breaches of the peace and deliver evil doers to the sheriff. Watchmen is also a rather stellar graphic novel, and stale-by-comparison-but-still-enjoyable movie adaptation, about how superheroes all really have crippling psychological disorders and may also be sexually repressed fetishists. 

The erasure of the watch system and subsequent formation of an organised police force was somewhat slow. This particular constabulary originally consisted of one super intendant and three constables, but it grew gradually along with the local population, recruiting two detectives in 1852, and then its first female police officers in 1918. In the 1960s it was also one of the first police forces to have personal radios. In 1966 it merged with police forces in Dudley, Wolverhampton and a few other areas to form West Midlands Constabulary, which is presumably when this police station was constructed.

West Midlands Constabulary lasted only eight years before it merged with other police forces such as Birmingham and Coventry in 1974, renaming itself simply West Midlands Police. It became the third largest police force in the UK after the Metropolitan police and the Scotland one although since 2010 it's considerably smaller than it once was, what with all the budget cuts.

Here's the lift, and nearby, the stairs. I decided first to head downwards to the cellar.

The cellar was actually huge, covering a much larger area than I thought it would, and being equally as labyrinthian as the upper floor.

It does eventually lead to the car park, which would have once been filled with police vehicles.

Now it's equally as trashed as every other room in the building, but it reminds me eerily of the carpark under the mall in Dead Rising, albeit without a horde of the undead.

I like these stairs. I hope it helped give the police the wonderful illusion that they worked in a magical world of levitating platforms, and not an ugly 1960s building.

There's a storage area near the carpark, with chairs and oddly, a picture of a human hand sticker on one of the doors.

Looks like the one finger was peeling and someone just came along and yanked it.

Onto the custody suite...

 

The reception desk is still here, with halls all around it lined with cells that would have once been used to detain criminals.

At present there are less than 200 custody suites in the UK, which is a reduction of more than 50% since 2010.

The cells are decorated with written warnings like "Don't vandalise the small room that we're keeping you in against your will, or we will have to arrest you."

And here's a polite notice that says "Just tell us what you did, so that we don't needlessly spend time and resources finding out that you did it."

The cell block actually wrapped around an external courtyard, but there was no way of accessing it. The doors leading out to it were either barricaded or locked.

 

Beyond this point, there was a stairway leading downwards, presumably to the carpark.

The sign on the door requests that the door be kept shut so that the vans exhaust fumes don't come up and polute the air in the custody suite. Even prisoners have the right to breathe clean oxygen, after all. Of course given our proximity to Birmingham, it's debatable how much clean oxygen is actually around.

But presumably when someone was arrested, they would have been dragged up here from the van to the cells.

At the bottom of these stairs, from where the picture is taken, the hall was actually flooded with a few inches of water. But curiously, I don't recall a hallway like this emerging in the carpark so I presume the vans dropped them off in a separate area. 

The coridor was featureless, with no windows or ventilation, and oddly enough, I found it the eeriest part of the entire building. There was a certain atmosphere down here that the rest of the building did not have. If you told me that this coridor was a portal to somewhere like Hell, or 1940s Auschvitz, or a Spice Girls concert, it wouldn't surprise me. I'd probably ask why a hallway in a police station custody suite led to those things, rather than actively disbelieve it.

So, moving upstairs!

The upper floors were very samey, in that there was a central stairway surrounded by smashed offices. The majority of the vandalism seemed to be up here, likely due to there being light coming in through the windows.

I'm not sure what purpose this smaller office had, but it had a pretty window.

Also situated on the first floor, above the carpark, was the gym.

 

 

The upper floors would get increasingly less interesting and more samey, so I haven't really kept track of which floor is which from this point. However, I was determined to make it up to the roof, wary of course, that if I was going to be spotted, it would be there.

Each floor had toilets, but I didn't photograph all of them. However, they're all in similar condition, which is still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.

Now allegedly there was a bar up here, but various urbex reports have said that there was absolutely nothing left up here at all, because it was all destroyed. However, I think this might have been the bar. Quite why a police station would have a bar is anyones guess, but I'm willing to bet it probably wasn't anything reminiscent of the kind you see in pubs. Most likely it was just a chillout area for when the police were off duty, or catching up with that mountain of paperwork over a pint. Short of actually speaking to someone who worked here, I don't know.

There's a railing here with what I presume is a wheelchair ramp buried somewhere underneath all the rubble. It's curious that out of every office, only this one had disabled facilities. Its likely that when the building was constructed in the somewhat less progressive 1960s, nobody took into consideration the possibility of someday recruiting a disabled person. No doubt, a disabled person ended up working in this office, and certain modifications were made to the area.

At present, any disabled person will probably struggle to get to the disabled toilet.

There's some interesting graffiti up here that says "Youtubers ruin urban exploring."
Beneath it, you can see that someone wrote their social media name, and someone else has crossed it out.

Personally I really dislike the drama. To clarify- an urban explorer is someone who goes into a derelict place with the intent on innocently (in theory) documenting it, whether in picture or video format. These mediums of documentation then find their way to social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr, and Youtube. Sometimes there are websites online specifically for sharing urban exploring stories, and these tend to form little online communities. Personally I prefer doing my blog, because it means I can do what I do in my own way, and I've recently taken my adventures onto Youtube, via my buddy Jess.
But most confusingly, there is a small degree of hatred from some urban explorers to those who prefer to document their adventures in other such ways. One time on a Facebook group, I pointed out my desire to get onto the Youtube platform, and it was shot down with hostility, to which I responded "Okay, if everyone hates Youtube so much, I'll just stick to my blog." This was then met with even more hostility. Apparently nobody likes bloggers either. So defeated, I asked them simply "Okay then, how do you want me to do it? Because you all do it. There's not a person in this urbex group who doesn't post what they find on the internet. What makes my method wrong?"
To which I got a few weak responses of "Yeah just carry on doing you.. lol."
See, they throw out their opinions on autopilot but when challenged, they haven't got an answer.

I personally think that those who demonstrate hostility will do so anyway regardless, and only need an excuse to do so. It's free-floating hostility that they rationalise retroactively. The only difference between what I do, and what a youtuber does, and what a user on an urban exploring website does, is the means of documentation, so I find the hostility rather absurd. I just get on with anyone as long as they aren't a cunt.

Personally, my only beef with SOME Youtubers is that their titles are a bit clickbaity. I remember seeing a video on Tilstock airfield that claimed in the title that they found old POW camp torture equipment in the operations block. It turned out to be an old telephone exchange.
I mean, the only thing torturous about telephones is trying to get sense out of a BT call centre, and I think the people in Tilstocks old POW camp had bigger concerns.
And then more recently, Youtubers hoaxed a human bone being found in the Christmas Cottages. It's stupid but I wouldn't say that it's outright ruining urban exploring. 

However, from all that, I can see why there is some dislike towards youtubers, but then let's remember that it was a non-youtubey urban explorer who bragged that he piddled in the kitchen sink of an abandoned house like it was the achievement of the century. Congratulations, grown man, you can urinate.
And here, in a police station, it's the anti-youtuber who commited the act of vandalism, in the process of hating on youtubers.

Whereas my friend Jess, who you should subscribe to, is a non-toxic youtuber with the same ethics towards urban exploring as me. And we're both lovely fucking humans. I mean, I'm rather opinionated at times, but not nasty about it. For example I think dungarees look ridiculous but I'll never be mean to someone for wearing them. Opinions are subjective. People are free to disagree with mine. But I'm still lovely. That's fact, not opinion.

The point is, generalising is wrong. Groups of people aren't idiots. Individuals are idiots. Generalising a whole group based on the actions of one idiot is just divisive and regressive.

Anyway, now that I've had my rant, here I am at the roof!

I love this sign. "This is a multi hazard area."

Hmm... I think I've sat on enough rooftops now to know a thing or two about those multi hazards. 

As always with rooftopping, the risk-reward ratio is pretty favourable. Being high up is something humans naturally find pleasurable. This is why we build houses with balconies. This is why we build rollercoasters and ferris wheels. This is why people with a death wish like me do what we do. 

And check out the view- It might be surrounded by uninteresting architecture but I still love it.

That weird thing is a church.

I don't like modern churches. If you're waiting for the second coming of Jesus, he's probably waiting for us to build him a nicer house. One with a balcony.

And here's the risky angle- a busy road with traffic lights. It's when cars are stopped that I might get spotted.

Overall I'm quite happy with this adventure, even though the location is a bit smashed. It has a mix of things that make it enjoyable- Rooftop access, creepy halls, a gym, jail cells. It's a shame that a purpose couldn't be found for it. In fact, it's a shame it closed altogether. I'm sure not a fan of the fact that vital services across the UK are having their funding cut. People have quite literally died as a result, and it's not looking to improve any time soon.

But let's not end on a negative. In all of human history, this is still the best time to be alive. A more diverse range of people have equal opportunity than ever before, and diseases that would have finished off our ancestors are now treatable. And natural selection is still at play- the idiots of the world don't believe in vaccinations. And look at the view- the world is still pretty, even in this concrete jungle.

That's all I have today. My next blog post is a rooftopping one as I make my way around the west midlands, and then I'm going to an abandoned house in the near vicinity. In the meantime, follow my on Instagram, like my Facebook page, subscribe to Jess's Youtube, and follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading!