There's this big unloved nursing home out in the middle of nowhere, which surprised me in that it was right across the street from a car park and a bus stop, but didn't seem to be in a populated area. Even the carpark was barren and unloved, and a little overgrown. A quick check on Google revealed that there actually was a village further up the road, but there was no indication of this on ground level. The place seemed creepy and isolated. So naturally, I felt right at home.
Credit to the external shot goes to my sister. I always save the external shots for after I've been in, so that if any members of the public see me and get suspicious, it doesn't jeopardise the adventure. However in this case my cameras battery died before I could take my own external shots. The place is much bigger than it looks.
Access was pretty easy. The doors are all unlocked and nobody seems to care. Entering through the main entrance, we came across the reception area. There's a safe behind the desk and then from this point the nursing home divides across various wards. On Google Maps it looks like multiple buildings, but they're all connected by various hallways.
I've seen a few photos of this place from before our visit, showing this wall decorated with amazing murals, but someone has come along and destroyed them.
Here's likely the managers office, given that it has a cute notice that reads "The best medicine for a managers heart is a good secretary."
As you can see, the secretaries housekeeping skills could use some improvement.
So if the little notice on the office door isn't a big enough indicator that this isn't a British care home, the facilities will definitely give it away. Prior to its closure in 2004 it had a built-in pharmacy, hairdresser, nursery, cinema, physiotherapy pool and also a ballroom.
I think theres a difference between giving people a happy life, and simply keeping them alive. The British care industry, tragically underfunded, mostly does the latter.
In its glory days this place housed up to 1,200 elderly people and also those described archaically as "adults who remained mentally at the level of development of a toddler."
I thought for a moment "We must be in Telford," but they're probably referring to adults with learning disabilities.
Nowadays such terminology would be frowned upon, but it's a product of its era, and examples of similar unflattering terms can be found throughout the world. For example the charity, Scope, was called The Spastic Society as recently as the mid 1990s, and I covered outdated treatments in the healthcare system in my Denbigh Asylum blog. So while referring to adults with learning disabilities in this way is a little unflattering, it probably wasnt intended to be cruel.
Here's the physiotherapy pool.
And check this out! It's a sauna! Who would ever imagine a nursing home having one of these?
I imagine in the UK there would be all sorts of health and safety mumbo-jumbo getting in the way before one of these was considered.
In spite of the buildings size, it didn't take long for us to realise that we weren't alone in there. My sister joked that the place was haunted, or there was a serial killer loose, but my imagination wandered to scarier possibilities, like maybe the bangs and footsteps we kept hearing was the cast of Love Island.
However it turned out to just be a couple of urban explorers, one of which was a fucking giant! I'm six foot two, and I got a small-man complex just standing next to him. Naturally I was further shocked to find out that he was just seventeen! He told me that there were cool things down in the nursing homes cellar. I wanted to ask how he knew, given that even if he was standing in the cellar, his eyes would be level with my knees if I was on the ground floor.
His girlfriend, quite odd in comparison in that she was a total dwarf, showed us an article about this place on her phone, which my sister quickly noted down the name of so that we could research it later. Slender Man and his lady friend then went on their way. To keep up, she wore roller skates and tied herself to his leg.
Each ward had numerous bedrooms with sinks next to the wardrobes, as well as bathrooms and communual areas. The furniture is long gone but there is still some character left.
Still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.
So in regards to the places history, I was pretty surprised to learn that this place was actually built to be a barracks in 1938. It was from here that the Luftwaffes barrage balloon unit operated.
The barrage balloon was for anti-aircraft defense. They were tethered so that they didnt float away, but they also raised metal cables that, in large enough quantities, posed a collision risk to approaching enemy aircraft. It meant that low flying aircraft, particularly dive bombers, had no choice but to fly at higher altitudes, where they could be picked off easier by the anti-aircraft. Sometimes there would even be bombs attached to the tethers, which could be detonated if enemy aircraft did get too close to the cables.
The buildings time as a barrage balloon barracks didnt last long. In 1940 the complex took its first steps towards healthcare when it became a training ground for medical personnel. But as the war escalated, it also began serving as a military hospital. This put a big old target on it for the allies, and of its original 38 buildings, only 22 survived the war.
Ooooh! German wall-scrawling., and a lovely depiction of the sun from Teletubbies if it was played by Donald Trump. Unfortunately I can't read the handwriting, so I can't translate. Perhaps someone better at reading cursive, and German, can help.
This has the easy-to-make-out phrase "Ich liebe dich," so it's a declaration of love, probably similar to all that teenage "Idiot A <3 Idiot B 4eva" that pops up on toilet cubicles in the UK.
The flowers on this door are remnants from before the place shut down. It's nice to see some of the former character shining through. Rather worryingly the names of various patients and former residents were still on some of the doors, but I'm not sure how German law works in regards to confidentiality. In the UK such things would have to be removed when the home closed down, although I have seen examples where this hasn't happened.
This has neater hand writing, but there are some words I can't make out. As far as I can see, it's about hatching eggs.
Oh look, it's Milhouse from the Simpsons, the one whose parents are brother and sister.
This graffiti is pointing at the last graffiti though, and vice versa.
It reads: "The lovers once existed! That was a nice time back then!"
And the rest is a little harder to read, but it seems to be poetry. But what does Milhouse have to do with this? Perhaps it's refering to loving the Simpsons, before the show went shit.
Following world war 2, the building became accommodation for resettlers, which I think would be the Germans who were exiled from central European countries like Czechoslovakia and the former German provinces that were annexed during the war. In 1948 it became a retirement home, but became a nursing home in 1953, the difference being the level of care provided.
However, the building closed in 2004, with the number of residents dwindled to a measely 800. There were apparently other wards on the former barracks but they were destroyed by arson. But still, there's a pretty huge chunk of this place left to mooch around.
I spent far too much time analysing this graffiti, because it's obvious from that oddly accurate face, that this is a play on "I am Groot," which Marvel fans will get. But the word that's been added onto it confused me because whoever wrote this can't write the letter "T." Someone who knows German would probably figure it out faster, but it took me a while to realise that it says "Tulpen."
"I am Tulip Groot!"
I love it.
Another communual area. Prior to 2004, this would have been full of old folks sipping their tea, watching TV and playing board games.
There's still soap here!
It's all very samey but I found the decay to be quite beautiful. Outside is a bit of a jungle, and with the glass holding back the outside world, it felt pretty isolated.
There's quite a lot of butterfly decor on many of the windows.
This room still has wallpaper designed to give the illusion that the old folks are sipping their tea on some sunny beach villa. It's a bit of a miracle that so much of it has survived.
More butterflies.
At the furthest ward, the woods recede a bit and sunlight still shines through the windows. It feels a lot more homely.
And here's a rear exit, leading into the overgrown garden.
There's a sun painted in the corner.
Here's a calendar from 2001.
From what I understand this was the nursery area. Presumably this was for visiting family members, but there are a few articles out there that discuss the benefits of co-locating nurseries and nursing homes. Intergenerational care homes haven't fallen into mainstream practice, but it's not unheard of. The first one was established in Japan in 1976.
It's a doodle of a car, by "Shaun."
This pretty much translates to "Conveying area."
The graffiti on this ward is a little more political, talking about "National Socialism."
Okay... so I use the term "talking about" very loosely. It just says "National Socialism."
This says "Get active," but given that it's the same writing as whoever wrote "National Socialism," I assume it's also about politics.
Okay, here we go. It's a flag, and it has a big old rant about some guy called Nick, calling him naive, stupid, and a state-controlled ass.
I have no idea who Nick is, but I can't help but love this. The fact that it's actually scratched over the flag graffiti, effectively defacing it, makes me wonder if "Nick" is actually the guy who wrote the political graffiti, and someone who knows him decided to come and roast him.
Moving on upstairs, there was more of the same, although the upper floor only covered the front portion of the nursing home, and didn't go over some of the more dilapidated wards, so it was in somewhat better shape.
The graffiti here is better too!
And look, it's a piece by Von Kiki!
Von Kiki has an unmistakable style. Long time readers of the blog will remember her from that factory where the Fokker planes were constructed during World War One.
Quite intriguingly, in the upper floors the rooms had padded doors, although few had actually survived without the fluff being ripped out by vandals and strewn on the floor. I'm not sure why they were like this. Perhaps this ward was for more challenging patients? But in contrast to that, the walls weren't padded.
As a worrying hint of things to come, this room has a perpetual drip coming down through a crack in the roof, which has gathered in a small pool in the middle of this floor, slowly weakening it. Even now I knew better than to walk in, but eventually this floor will collapse completely.
I assume this room was an office, mostly because where else in a care home would one find noticeboards?
Some of the writing has faded but the header is basically talking about the reporting obligations of the employer, so presumably this would have been a notice in a staff area.
This is cool. Someone has drawn a swastika, and someone else has come along and turned it into a window. We should do this with all swastika graffiti.
Someone wrote an entire novel here, but I can't make out a single word. Anywaaaay... someone mentioned a cellar.
This graffiti reading "Go down and have fun" is pretty inviting, but it was the big metal door at the bottom that really interested me.
This is the same style of door that I saw in various other underground military facilities across Germany. Down here, the place more resembles its past as a barracks.
In the cellar, there are two exits that leave the building entirely, and each one is made up of a room separated from the rest of the cellar, and the outside, by two heavy metal doors.
But most curiously is that these rooms had a shower. I think that this cellar was once intended to be used as a bunker during the cold war. This room would be completely isolated from the rest of the cellar, so that people entering could shower and decontaminate themselves before entering the main facility.
Of course, Germany didn't recieve any nuclear strikes so the bunker aspect was never really used. But what's worth noting is that during the 1950s and 1960s when the cold war was escalating, this place was already being used as a nursing home, according to the official sources. So did the military repurpose part of the original barracks to be used, independently of the nursing home above it, or was this facility to keep the residents of the nursing home safe?
If that's the case, German nursing homes win. Good luck finding a nursing home in the UK with a nuclear bunker under it.
And here's the exit, coming out into the overgrown grounds of the nursing home. This is just one exit, of course. The other is at the other side of the cellar.
This door is labeled "chemicals for swimming pool" which would indicate that the cellar served a more utility purpose in spite of being made to serve as a bunker if the need arose.
I'm no swimming pool expert, so I have no idea why the portion of the cellar assigned to the swimming pool would have a small square hole in the floor.
Check it out! It's a floppy disk!
The sign says "distribution heating."
Here's the second exit. It's smaller than the last, but has the same basic bunker signs, being a room separated by two big metal doors, and a decontamination shower.
It's pretty amazing, but that brings us to the end.
After being left to rot for sixteen years, developers have proposed plans, such as a therapy centre for drug addicts, or a care facility for stroke victims. However so far the funds to do anything haven't been raised. And as we know, the longer these places are left exposed to the elements, the more restoration will be needed. And let's not forget that rather ominous floor upstairs, about to collapse.
That's all I've got. Next time I'm blogging about a college that I visited with my friend Alice, and then I'm blogging about a solo adventure to an abandoned mansion. In the meantime, follow my Instagram, my Twitter, and give my Facebook a like.
Thanks for reading!
