Abandoned pub

 (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 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.

Recently while I was casually getting on with my excellent life, I stumbled across this cute abandoned roadside pub in a ridiculously rural area. Pub closures are often personal to a lot of people. They're a communual hub. Whenever I talk about them, multiple people will pop up and fill the comments section with anecdotes and memories, and it's great. I love that shit. I'd love to say keep it coming, except this time I won't be telling anyone the name of this place, or where it is. There's too much to loot! There's still booze in this place! And if I have to stay sober because of my code of ethics, so do all of you!

As one enters through the front doors, there's a sign that says that bikers are welcome, which is quite nice. Any example of open-mindedness, I can respect, because it's in such short supply. I think it's rather sad that any group of people being unwelcome is such a likelihood that a place has to specify when they are welcome. I know I have this rare mental condition where I just accept that people in the world aren't exactly like me, but I still think pubs should be for everyone, unless someones behaving like an imbecile.

The opening hours are still hanging up too, although they've all been erased and replaced with the message "Closed 10pm. Sorry for any inconvenience." Apology accepted. This pubs closure isn't inconvenient for me at all.

The food prices are still listed on a sign too. But in regards to interior decor, the signs seem to be the most common thing left behind. The majority of the tables and seats have gone.

Check it out! It's a cute pub, and positively ancient.

Old maps depict it attached to a blacksmiths but now in the modern era, the good old traditional village blacksmith is obsolete, and the two buildings were joined into one rather spacious pub. At some point it also started operating as a restaurant too, and it boasted a massive beer garden. The garden today was almost impossible to get around, having been snatched back by nature and now a mess of brambles and nettles.

Here's the specials menu, listing this food as being available from 5pm til 10pm.

 

There's still a drink on the bar, alongside several sticks of bamboo. I'm not sure what that drink is, but given that this pub closed almost a decade ago, I feel a little bit dubious about it. But why is all this bamboo here???

The only real story of this pub I've been able to find may very well be the one that led to its downfall. In 2009, it was being lived in by a chap named Al and his wife. I don't know her name. I'm sorry, how very John Steinbeck of me.
Al's wife had health issues so naturally she moved out after an incident in March when a car crashed into the pub. Al stayed behind to take care of the pub, admitting to the local papers that living somewhere different to his wife was straining things somewhat. But she wanted to feel a bit more secure, which is fair enough.

It turned out to be a wise decision because just two months later, the pub was hit by another car. This time it went straight through the wall and into the building.
Al had been in bed at the time and thought he was being burgled, but wasn't any more pleased to find this wasn't the case, given that there was now a car inside his pub. But Al later admitted to the paper that the thing that annoyed him most was that the two men who had crashed the car were more concerned with locating their dropped phones than with whether or not he was okay. That's a reasonable issue to have, given the circumstances.
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Miraculously nobody was hurt, but streetview of this pub from 2009 shows the extent of the damage, and it's pretty intense! It allegedly took the workmen four days just to get the car out while ensuring the structural stability of what was left.

And they did an amazing job rebuilding what was lost! Check it out! This is the portion of the pub that had to be rebuilt from scratch, and with its ceiling beams and tiled floor, you'd never guess that it only dates back to 2009. However, it seems that the cost of the rebuild was a bit much, and the pub was ultimately sold. It made its way around various owners, even becoming a popular music venue, before finally closing for good in 2012.

Here's where the dartboard would have hung. Next to it the scores of the last game are still written... or are they?

Because right next to it is another score board! Similarly this hasn't been wiped out either, but I have to wonder, why did they record the scores for two different games without erasing the last one? Ones between Home and Away, while the other is between Awesome and Baboon, so maybe one scoreboard was for tournaments while the other was for more casual games.

Quite worrying is the wine rack, still full. And yes, there is liquid still in these bottles. It's either a looters wet dream or a cruel prank with bottles full of urbexer urine. I didn't want to find out.

Here the bands used to play, right where that table is.

And here you can see the doors leading out  into the beer garden, which is more of a jungle at this stage.

Theres a door next to the back exit that leads into the kitchen.

All of the kitchen equipment is long gone, just like the majority of the bar furniture, which only raises the question of why some things were cleared out but not the alcohol, or more importantly, this adorable little kitchen ghost.

The pub didn't have a cellar that I could see, but the storage area was around the back.

And curiously I found the doorway upstairs to be locked, and that just left one last place to look, the best part of any abandoned building, the toilets!

Holy Smokes! The ladies toilet has a carpet! That's a little unfair on the gents... Oh, who am I kidding? If this was the gents, there would be pond life growing in the carpet by the end of the week!

Now for a direct comparison between the female and male toilets...

It's still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.

I'm not sure what the future holds for this pub. It's no doubt got a lot of fun memories, and a lot of traumatic one if you happened to be in bed when a car came crashing through the wall. In 2014 plans were drawn up to convert this place into two houses, but nothing has come of it. Allegedly travelers were also using the site in 2015, but they've since buggered off. Perhaps too many cars kept hitting their camp. Now it just quietly rots away, still empty, wide open, and somehow remains unvandalised. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I'm the first person to find this place, but whoever has been here before me was respectful.

That's all I got for this place. After this will be a blog about a barracks, and then after that I'm going to do a folly. In the meantime, Like my Facebook, Follow my Instagram and Follow my Twitter.
Thanks for reading!

Truck Graveyard

Vehicle graveyards are quite fascinating, usually because someone must have put a considerable amount of effort into procuring them, all to seemingly just leave them. In this case, a bunch of trucks are just rotting away in some mildly wooded countryside, and nobody seems to know why. How bloody fascinating! Naturally my standard methods of research are redundant in the face of such a collection. I can find out everything about the history of the area, but that won't tell me why someone put these here.

I should also probably point out that I know absolutely nothing about trucks. I'm adorably ignorant. I know that they carry things, and that I wouldn't want to be hit by one, but that's about it. I actually was struck down by a cement mixer once when I was eighteen, and nobody, not the driver, not me, and certainly not the people held up in traffic by my body sprawled out on the road, have an idea whatsoever how I was able to get up and walk that off. Perhaps I'm indestructible. Let's not put that to the test though.

So anyway, trucks aren't really my passion. I wasn't even going to come here until I heard wacky stories of some crazy person lurking around threatening people with a baseball bat, and that appealed to my sense of adventure. Could I sneak in, see it all, and then sneak out again without being bludgeoned to death? It's a win-win for me. I'm far too happy to consider suicide, but I still don't want to grow old. What a conundrum. My horrific murder is the best case scenario.

I did, at first, censor all of the number plates with dinosaur erotica, but there's only so much of that I was willing to hunt down, so in the end I settled for more subtle methods. The reason for censorship being that I don't want to take any chances with revealing the location. Incidentally if you do want to see dinosaur erotica censoring vehicle number plates, feel free to hit me up.

I approached the trucks through the trees, disturbing a myriad of wildlife as I did so. This was a good sign. If I was the one disturbing the animals then this means I'm the only human here.

I made my way around the trucks pretty cautiously, expecting to turn a corner and see the legendary chap with a baseball bat. At first every noise of something flapping in the wind made me nervous, but I started to relax as I realised that I was alone here.

Originally I did start looking up the details of the vehicles number plates, but they were far too numerous and often I simply got the same story. These vehicles all had their tax due at least as long ago as 2014, but as far back as 1995.

Likewise with the number plates, I originally started looking into the companies that these vehicles represented. I found that they came from all over. "Banwy" is a Welsh firm, and Ford Fuel Oils are based down near Bristol. I wasn't really gaining much from looking this up, apart from the knowledge that this collection has been obtained from all over the country.

Look at  nature claiming it all back though. This isn't a cherished collection. Nobody cares about all these. There doesn't seem to be any endgame, no purpose for obtaining them. They've just been hoarded and then left.

Hey cool, a bin lorry. Well I guess if there is an angry person lurking with a baseball bat, at least they have somewhere to dispose of my body.

"The future of distribution." An ironic statement, given the trucks condition.

There's a cement mixer. Another means for the baseball bat guy to dispose of my body...

Check this out! It's a prison van! This was, for me, the highlight of the visit. It's not something one comes across every day. I did wonder if it could be accessed.

Alas, the van was locked, but as you can see someone has been pretty enthusiastic about getting in!

Here's a truck for the rockstar energy drink. I've never tried it. I wonder if it tastes like reindeer piss like all the other energy drinks?

There's an Irn Bru lorry here too!

As I exited the wooded area, expecting the trucks to be a little more scarce away from the tree cover, I found that this wasn't the case. They're just scattered all over.

That's about it. There's not much in the way of a narrative, but sometimes I don't think there needs to be. It's all fairly self explanatory. It's a bunch of trucks that someone has collected and dumped here, and they're in varying levels of decay. Obviously I won't be saying where because they'll get ripped apart, stolen, and sold. It would be far more interesting to see what this place is like five years from now, when nature has had more time to consume it all.

I've got a few vehicle graveyards mapped out across Europe, of varying types. Ships, tanks, cars, etc, and many have been left for far longer than these trucks, making them beautiful examples of vehicular decay. Sadly the whole Covid-19 debacle has slowed my blog conquest of Europe, but I've still got plans.

The next blog posts will be the standard nuclear bunkers and abandoned pubs. Standardly awesome, that is. I love this shit. In the meantime, Follow my Instagram, Like my Facebook and Follow my Twitter. That's the best way to get updates.

Thanks for reading!