Church of St Saberhagen

(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. Under UK law, trespass without force is a civil offence. I never break into a place, I never photograph a place that is currently occupied, as this would be morally wrong and intrusive, 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  location.  I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building.)

Today we're out in rural Wales continuing our tradition of naming featured chapels and churches after made-up saints. We approached tentatively, given that last time I set foot in a derelict chapel, God banned me on Facebook. I guess this is how they smite blasphemers in the digital age, or maybe his "spontaneous combust" button was broken or something.

This chapel was built in 1833, but it was rebuilt in 1868 when God said "Guys, I want my church to have a gable entrance, because they're fashionable right now."
The architect was a well-known chapel architect of the time, whose parents must have hated him, because they made sure his first name was the same as his last, christening him Thomas Thomas. He's built over 100 chapels throughout Wales, and one in Oswestry, in Shropshire.

This one closed its doors for good in 1973, and it's been falling into decay ever since. Rumour has it that the owner closed the chapel and fled abroad in order to avoid paying a bill of £250,000 to make the derelict church walls safe and less likely to crumble and fall on passing motorists.
But this is probably false. If it posed that much of a danger, and the owner just left in 1973, the powers that be would have at least erected some sort of safety measure by now, and they haven't, in spite of the bill going unpaid. 

The truth about derelict chapels is simple. If one considers how rural Wales can get, imagine it back in the time before motorized transport and the internet. Back in the 1800s, a remote Welsh congregation would have been fairly isolated from the rest of the world, with the church being a communual hub. People didn't come here to hear about Jesus, they came here to catch up with their friends afterwards.

However, as the rest of the world became more accessible, the tinier chapels began to lose their usefulness to the community, and eventually many simply no longer had a purpose.

The interior is bloody gorgeous though.

Written here is "Duw Cariad Yw," which means "God Loves."

Except, he doesn't. I've never understood where the whole concept of a loving God came from. In the original source material, the bible, he's very much the antagonist of the story. All of the humans are just doing their thing, getting fat, shooting their DNA into each other, calling each other racist on Twitter for doing something not even remotely racist. You know, human stuff. And then along comes God, and he's like "Worship me or I'll kill your kids."

Look, I'm no expert on love, and I dont really want to be. All humans do is confuse and irritate me. But I'm pretty sure that if I went on Tinder and opened with "Worship me or I'll kill your kids" then it's guaranteed that I'll be dying alone. In jail.

As you've probably guessed, religion and I don't get along. I think it all depends on what resonates with someone personally though. If the thought of a deity works for you, then that's okay. For me, a lover of history, religion defies logic purely because humans have existed for thousands of years before any of it. Christianity dates back to the first century, AD, some 4000 years after the earliest confirmed human civilisation, and if you took the entirety of Earths existence and compacted it all into a single 24 hour day, humans didn't show up to the party until 11:58pm. It just doesn't make sense that after thousands of years of existence a human just happens to stumble upon the absolute truth, and it just so happens to involve doing what that person says or risk going to Hell.

The ceiling of the church is mostly still there.

Some of it's here too.

This image is pretty terrible because the sun is literally situated right in front of the chapel, likely a deliberate choice of architectural positioning, so that the chapel would be flooded with light during a service.

What a curious contraption. This doesn't seem to be part of the original chapels seating. In fact, it looks like someone has used pieces of the church pews to build a little box den, complete with little steps leading up to it.

Isn't that cute? I wonder what we'll find inside the box!

Oh...

The pews are numbered. This is actually a remnant of an outdated practice where churchgoers were allocated seats based on social rank. The front pews would be reserved for higher ranking members of society like, for example, Maggie Thatcher and her hot grand daughter Amanda, while towards the back of the church would be the poor people, the eccentrics, and me staring longingly at the back of Amandas lovely head.

Numbered pews fell out of practice in the late 1800s, and now anyone can park their buttocks wherever they want in a church, but many old chapels still have the numbers on them, as a reminder that this religion that talks of a kind, loving, perfect God is still ruled over by a bunch of flawed fleshbag humans and their silly intolerances, who are each just as gassy as the rest of us.

There's an old organ here, and I was quite surprised to see that the keys are wooden. I've never actually seen an organ with wooden keys before, and it's a massive shame that it's been trashed when it could have been saved and preserved.

Amongst the rubble of the former organ is this little chunk of writing which reveals that this was built by John W Reed, a London-based manufacturer of organs and pianos in the late 1800s.

John W Reed didn't move to London until 1861, and based on what can be found on the 1871 census and his sons christening records of 1877, he made his career change into Piano manufacturing during that period.

However, in 1881, he changed his business title, and all his products had written on them "J W Reed & Sons" instead of simply "John W Reed Manufacturers."

This means that this poor, trashed church organ dates back to anywhere between 1877 and 1881. It's a bloody antique! It's a treasure! And here it is, wrecked and strewn across the floor of a chapel that's practically ready to strew itself across the floor with it.

There's a nice little, oddly modern looking candle stick to end on.

That's all I've got. I love churches and chapels. Regardless of my religious opinions, everywhere mattered to someone once, and this is very apparent when one looks at religious sites which were once packed with people. This ruin had meaning once, but now it doesn't, and will likely collapse on itself in the not too distant future, and that is kinda sad.

Share the blog wherever. Next time I'm checking out a nuclear bunker and then I'm looking at an abandoned hotel. In the meantime, follow my Instagram, like my Facebook and follow my Twitter.

Thanks for reading!

The builders merchant

(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. Under UK law, trespass without force is a civil offence. I never break into a place, I never photograph a place that is currently occupied, as this would be morally wrong and intrusive, 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  location.  I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building.)

On our way to another location, we stumbled across this small derelict building protruding from a great big bush. As it was raining, so we didn't get any external shots, and since we weren't planning on finding this place, we didn't know what it was either. We simply saw a building that was clearly derelict, and decided to check it out, and find out what it was based on what we found inside.

And of course, we have the internet to help. Can my precious internet help provide a backstory to a generic derelict building at the side of a road? Of course it can! It's the entirety of recorded human knowledge at our fingertips. Just because some people use it to call everyone racist on Twitter, doesn't make it evil! Or to quote Professor X, it's like a pen. You might use it to draw a pretty picture or you might use it to jab someone in the eye, but it's still just a pen. Granted he was talking about psychic powers, not the internet, but who cares? They're almost the same thing. I can tell what everyones doing with both, whether I want to or not.

The photo is taken from streetview. The time rewind on Streetview actually goes back as far as 2009, and nothing has changed, except the jungle in the yard retreats back and looks like a timber yard again. The building, however, is unaltered. It looked like this even back then. Of interest to me is that little chunk of wall there that was clearly added at a later date, indicative that there were perhaps steps leading up to the yard, or maybe someone crashed a bus into the wall and it had to be replaced. I don't know. I'm not the mainstream media. I'm not going to just look at an imperfect chunk of wall and say "The gays/muslims/straight white men did it." No, we deal in facts here, and when facts aren't apparent, speculation will do, so long as we make sure to call it such.

Old maps show this building as far back as 1900, but unlabeled. While derelict by 2009, the interior indicates that its last usage was as a Travis Perkins. For those who don't know, this is a builders merchants, specialising in building materials, timber, bathrooms, kitchens, power tools, landscaping materials, and painting / decorating materials. The company actually dates back to 1797 but wasn't known as Travis Perkins until 1988, the name constantly amalgamating based on constant merging.

Entering into the building was pretty easy. The path had been made by others who had come before us. This isn't at all unusual.
Nevertheless, we were still surprised by what we found in here. Wooden boards had been propped up on various desks in what looks like an attempt to make a skatepark.

 That's pretty cool and creative. Some might see this ingenuity and think that the kids are hoodlums who need stopping, but not me. Clearly the kids were bored and they decided to create an area where they could have some harmless fun. Good for them.
But water damage had rotted the wooden boards, putting them beyond use now, as the weight of a skateboard or bike would probably snap it like soggy cardboard. If this had been the place to be for local kids, it was a long time ago.

Given that Travis Perkins moved from here at some point prior to 2009, it's kinda surprising to see various signs and stuff still here. The company still exists. In fact the town of this location still has a branch active! I don't understand why they didn't move everything out when they left the premises.

Loads of ornamental mugs on a shelf behind the desk.

Here's an electric rat!

 Here's a trophy from Quiz Night 1995.

In the stock room is an old computer monitor.

And here's a really creepy rabbit.

This building was in the vicinity of a toll house. In fact it may have actually have been the toll house, but I'm not sure. They tend to be right on the road, so that people passing through can hand over the dosh without leaving their steeds back. It's plausible that the pavement is new, or that the building is on the site of a previously existing toll house. All I know is that some records show that it once had a stone slab fixed to the exterior wall with a list of various tolls, differing depending on what people were taking through the town, listing different prices for number of wagons and type of livestock. The last toll was apparently collected in 1885 to mark the end of toll collection.

The staff kitchen is pretty grimy, having seemingly just been left on the last day of work.

The Travis Perkins mission statement still hangs on the wall.

And now onto the best part of any derelict building- the toilets.

They're still cleaner than the toilets in some pubs and clubs. And look, there's still a little bit of toilet paper.

It seems that Travis Perkins is particularly big on long-winded mission statement posters, because rather than just have a sign that says "Wash your hands, bud," we get this masterpiece entitled "Simple rules for a hygienic branch"

What amuses me about signs like this is that they usually come into being because someone has gotten fed up with all the things listed being done. So from this, we can assume that someone who worked here was a massive slob.

The actual staff office is pretty tiny.

Here's a blazer hanging up.

A printer still in its box.

Here's a nice little poem written on a certificate to be awarded to the office moaner. In my experience, the office moaner is often either the office slob, fed up of being asked to flush the toilet after themself, or the person who is often telling the office slob to flush the toilet after themself.

However this moaners degree is awarded to "Dad" so presumably whoever worked here recieved this from his children and hung it up in his office.

Fortunately for the office moaner, there's also a poster offering tips on thinking positive, which I actually can't mock, because it's cheesy but true.

Oh, here we have a mug shot of a shoplifter. Give this guy a round of applause for stealing from a timber yard. That shit's heavy!

There is an upstairs area, labeled "Staff Only." Presumably this was a stock room but also a possible break room given that the downstairs staff area consists of a tiny office.

There's a beano annual from 1997.

And there's a bath up here, which presumably was stock.

An old cash register.

Illuminati graffiti, which makes a nice change from badly drawn penises. The door next to it leads to a drop. Upstairs doors are actually a common sight in a lot of old buildings, because there would have been a rope and pulley system to lift coal and other stock into the building.

Check out these vintage troll dolls! Somewhere out there a collector is screaming at the poor condition that these are in, and I understand. I'd feel the same if this was a vintage Transformer.

And lastly there's a typwriter.

And that's all I've got. This was a quick detour of a larger road trip, and while it was unplanned, that sort of adds to the charm. It's not as if we went online and said "Oh, there's a derelict Travis Perkins. Let's swing by." No, it was an accidental discovery, and that brings its own appeal. 

As for what the future holds, it has been proposed that a Tesco be built here, which is a nice alternative to the standard pattern of progress, demolishing old original buildings to throw up a copycat housing estate.

Next time, I'm checking out a derelict church, which I love, and then continuing on to a nuclear bunker in the blog after that. In the meantime, share the blog, like my Facebook, follow my Instagram, and follow my Twitter.

Thanks for reading!