Police Headquarters

 

A little while ago I decided to check out this big derelict police headquarters. As much as I would have loved to have a nice, chilled mooch around the entire place, I caught the attention of one of the locals. This is usually bad in urbex, because it results in them reporting our antics and having the adventure cut short. In this case I found out that this is only the second-worst thing that could happen, as the adolescent decided instead to follow me around, talking incessantly about how great ketamine is while trying to get into every photo I was taking, in the hopes that they'd end up internet famous. 

Whenever I took a photo, I had to shine a light down the hallway and say "Hey look, some ket," and take the photo while they were gallivanting off like a dog playing fetch.

But nevertheless, despite the feeling of annoyance that I associate with it, the building is pretty cool. It's huge and imposing, and its boarded up windows are decorated with art to make it slightly less of an eyesore. Thanks to the internet, it's easy to find photos of this place in its glory days.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

Similarly thanks to the internet, I was also able to find an image from 1954 which shows the police station being constructed in the background while viewing platforms are being erected for a presumably unrelated visit from the Queen.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

And it's even possible to see what used to stand on the site of the police station in this photo of a civil defence service inspection from 1941. According to old Victorian maps, this building was a rectory.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

I wish I could see photos of all my featured locations, prior to them being there. I think that sort of thing is genuinely interesting.

The artwork that now decorates the police station also deserves a closer look, purely because I think some of it is pretty cool. It was allegedly done by students in 2015.

 

And also, before I slip inside I want to include some more vintage photos. Here's the police station in the background of a photo of the Queen greeting the mayor in 1961.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

And of course, here's a shot of the bobbies themselves, posing proudly with their canine companions.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

I think this photo is from 1978, and in quite a twist for this particular police station, I've heard that the police officers were actually scarier than the dogs. And this other photo from 1963 confirms it! Just look at how the police dressed during this lecture about road safety!

(Photo not mine, obviously)

What the hell is going on? Are the police trying to teach people the importance of road safety through their nightmares? Are you going to Inception them into driving safely?

It's also worth noting that in 1998 the police station featured on The Bill, in in episode 99 of series 14.

I don't follow The Bill, but I watched the episode anyway to get these screen shots.

 

 

Who are these men? Why are they so grumpy? I don't know, and I don't really care because I probably won't watch The Bill again. I found it all a bit dull. But that's this police station in the background.

 

Construction of the police station allegedly began as far back as 1947, it's predecessor being a building from 1847 that even in 1909 was said to be not fit for purpose. This redundancy was exacerbated during wartime when the madness of evacuating a building full of confidential police records was brought to everyone's attention. To fix this problem, it was proposed that this new police headquarters would have its control room in the basement. 

 

It's also said to be quite close to a masonic lodge, which some have speculated gives the po-po less distance to walk. Make of that what you will.

The Police Headquarters was opened in 1957 by Edward John Stanley, the 18th Earl of Derby. This guy seems rather interesting. He fought in the war, he was an active freemason, he collected race horses, he turned his ancestral estate into a safari park, and he blew most of his money on gambling. But what really caught my attention was that his wife survived a very serious attempt on her life in 1951, when a nineteen-year-old trainee footman shot her in the neck with an MP-40 submachine gun. The bullet apparently entered the back of her neck and exited just under her ear. She fell forward and pretended to be dead, while the gunman went on to kill her servants. The fact that she survived is quite miraculous, and perhaps contributes to her husbands interest in opening police stations.

 

As far as derelict buildings go, the police building is actually really nice. I love visual decay, and this building gives that with its peeling paint and darkened hallways, while still being structurally sound. A little TLC would see this place back up and running. There's nothing really wrong with it.

 

In spite of how it looks now, at the time that it opened the police station boasted state of the art accommodation for officers, jail cells, and the most modern information room outside of Scotland yard. With the Cold War in full swing, the cellar of the police station was also designed to serve as a bunker for the city administration, also with the intent of using it as a base of operations for defending the city in the event of war or rioting. 

The presence of a bunker lends itself to rumours of tunnels and all sorts, but being in the presence of a jabbering imbecile distracting me, I actually didn't find it. But then, I don't think many people have. I don't think it was decked out like an obvious bunker, so much as built to serve as one if the need arose. I've heard some people say that there was a boxing club down there too.

 

The police Summons & Warrants Department and Communications Department were based here, as well as the Regional Crime Squad. They dealt with crime that the local forces didn't have the resources to tackle, that transcended force boundaries. They focused more on organised crime, contract killing, trafficking, that sort of thing.

 

The police station did tours throughout the 1970s, and held children's discos on Fridays. They also held children's Christmas parties, and at least one of these parties was attended by Jimmy Saville.

I have no idea if anything dodgy happened at these children's parties, or if any of the police were involved, but the Saville case does lead to a rabbit hole of speculation, given that he got away with it for so long, despite it being known about, because of his powerful friends. Or rather, as I suspect, the dirt he had on his powerful friends. If he went down, they did too, which is why any official revelations had to wait until he was out of the way.

But then I did read that some police cadets in the 1960s were trained by a Don Macintosh, who was arrested in 1994 for sex offences against young boys dating back to the 1970s. He was able to prey on the children through his "Boys Brigade" that he ran through the local church. The church actually covered up the allegations of his abuse when a boy tried to kill himself in 1988, and the predator was able to claim more victims for an additional six years. It's pretty heartbreaking.

 

And maybe I'm joining dots that shouldn't be joined, but I'm curious. Here we have Saville attending a Christmas party at the Cop Shop, untouchable even though so many people knew exactly what he was doing, and then there's a police officer who was also a nonce, albeit not as untouchable. It does make me wonder if this is just a coincidence, but I'm in no position to speculate or point fingers. I have no doubt at all that many people in the police do join up for the right reasons, and are good people. It's just one of those things that makes me wonder just how rotten the apple is.

 

Here we have the old police cells, numbered and with their cute little windows. Obviously this isn't a prison as such, but more of a place to temporarily detain people while the police do police things. 

Countless people have spent the night in these cells, and I happen to have dug up a few stories. The famous-ish organised crime figure, Paul Massey, aka Mr Big, has been here. He was an interesting gangster, to say the least. For all his criminal antics, he would still find money for a little old lady whose house had been broken into. He would also mediate between different feuding gangs, and surprisingly he ran for mayor in 2007. 

 

In 1990 there was a surprise birthday party for his cousin, and a masked man showed up and just shot a guy in the leg. The victim happened to be the brother of another fairly well-known criminal, Paul "One-Punch" Doyle, who was jailed for drug smuggling in 2015. His brother survived the gunshot and left the premises, and soon after police showed up at the party, looking for the gunman. Paul Massey, along with many others who were partying, had no idea that anyone had been shot and just assumed the police were here to ruin their innocent night. They barricaded themselves in at first but as the police search for the gunman continued, some one hundred people besieged this police station in balaclavas, and Paul Massey was detained and charged with intimidating the police, because he pointed his fingers at them as if they were guns. See, silly things like that are why people don't like the police. This is an organised crime figure and the most you can do him for is hurting feelings? Some people just need to check their egos and grow up.

Paul Massey was shot dead in 2015, on my birthday. Guys, if that's the kind of present you want to give me then I have a list, okay?

 

Other notable people who have stayed in these tiny cells are Colin Blaney, the football hooligan turned author, and also Alan Lord, who was one of the ringleaders of the Strangeways Prison Riot in 1990. That is actually a fairly significant event in history, because it raised awareness of overcrowding and poor living conditions in the British prison system. 

Last Christmas my brother, in jail for manslaughter, got a full Christmas dinner while I, working in healthcare, got a free sausage bap for my twelve-hour shift at my local hospital. So lets have a round of applause for our shitty system. NHS workers officially get treated worse than people in prison. But the mainstream media had everyone clapping for us during the pandemic, so it's okay.

 

 

The cells here are rather tiny and featureless. I imagine having to stay here would be pretty damn boring. 

 

One of the more interesting people to stay in one of these cells was a computer hacker who went by the online pseudonym "Pad." 

As the 20th Century drew to a close, the rise in technology saw the introduction of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Pad, along with fellow hackers Gandalf and Wandii were to become the test case of the new anti-hacking law. The group mainly just hacked computers and left little cheeky notes for the system admins, but they never did anything too serious. Nevertheless, Pad was hauled into one of these cells and told that he'd cost London Polytechnics a quarter of a million in damages. Quite where the police got this number from, nobody knows. BT had recommended a complete rebuild of the system for considerable cost, but had not provided a figure, nor was there evidence that the amount had been spent. It was a show trial, more than anything, where the media went nuts about the big bad hackers that lurk around us, with headlines like "Teenage computer hacker caused worldwide chaos."

 

So yeah, he's been here. I have no idea where he is or who he really was, but it's pretty interesting.

 

Moving on, we have many smashed offices.

 

 

Despite the decay and vandalism, there are a few fixtures here that catch the eye, like the police logo on this door.

 

 

The explosives store is predictably empty, but I just love that the sign is still here.

 

 

It's starting to flood down here a bit.

 

 

There are some old lockers down here too.

 

 

Occasionally we'd find these little yellow tickets littering the floor, containing the details of confiscated evidence, but I can't make out the handwriting. What was confiscated? I seem to remember my imbecilic companion managed to read it but I forget, which is a shame because they had finally become useful to me. What's interesting is that the date on this is is the 4th January 2004. It's been down here for nearly twenty years.

 

I did find an interesting story about this police station from 1966. It's commonly referred to as the story of Lord Foulmouth, even though the titular man isn't really the main star. He did instigate the event though. In this case, he and a chap called Mr Harper caught a taxi to go and get drunk with a man called Mr Sheffield. 

 

Lord Foulmouth, so nicknamed because he was a gobby little shit, insisted on paying the taxi driver with a fiver even though the driver didn't have change. An argument broke out, and Foulmouth got so gobby and abusive that a crowd gathered. Harper apparently tried to solve the conflict by paying the fare with ten shillings but Foulmouth insisted that the taxi driver receive no fare at all. As a result, the cab driver called the police. The police officer spoke to Harper, but Harper apparently just kept poking him in the chest while making his point, oddly in contrast to the voice of reason role he'd had so far. Mr Sheffield then showed up and got involved, and as things got heated. Foulmouth slipped into the crowd and made his escape but Harper and Sheffield were arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and taken here.

Both Harper and Sheffield went on to make allegations of police brutality, claiming that as soon as Harper was thrown in the van, the police officer started beating him. A second police officer said "I'm having no part in this," and jumped out of the van. By the time he made it to his cell, Harper had black eyes, cuts that needed stitches, and he was spitting up blood. He was eventually taken to the hospital. 

Sheffield, in the same cell, was poked with a stick and told  "If you don't button your lip, you'll be next." 

The magistrates court asked why they'd send Harper to hospital, seeing as that would draw publicity to it. He responded that they were worried due to him spitting up blood. Sheffield was asked why they'd let him be a witness to the beating. He said he didn't know. The court concluded "Both these men were drunk and I don't believe a word either of them says." Both were fined for being drunk and disorderly.

 

The police headquarters elevator is, rather oddly, full of porn. Needless to say, the lift is out of order. I'll be taking the stairs!

So regarding the case of Harper and Sheffield, it was dismissed as a lie but it doesn't add up. It seems to me that if Harper was making it all up, then I don't think there would such little details like the one police officer jumping out of the van because he wanted nothing to do with it. Harper didn't name him, so he wasn't offering any personal credit. But if Harper did want to stir up shit, surely he would have accused all of them of being in on it?

If anything the fact that the police officer just left the van but didn't do anything to stop the violence is more indicative of a culture of brutality that some better police would rather just be ignorant of. I've seen the same sort of culture in abusive care homes, where good staff ultimately just choose to stay silent and eventually leave because reporting issues just gets them ostracised. 

 

So it came as no surprise that this was actually not the only allegation of police brutality to come from here. Many prisoners were known to "accidentally" fall down the steps and bang their head, and quite a few people claim to have been beaten up while detained. Some locals even witnessed police beating up a person in the carpark behind the police station. It's been said that the police here were hated not only by the public but by other police stations, and I found one intriguing piece of written testimony by a police officer that says rather ominously "Overall police officers were respected. We now know that some overstepped the mark, but the majority did a good job and had the support of the community. But nobody wanted to be arrested and taken here." 

He also goes on to mention that not every police officer liked being paired up with cadets for their eight hour shift, because it forced them to do things properly, as they were being observed by a fresh pair of eyes. 

 

But it's important to point out that most of the stories of police corruption happen in the 1960s and 1970s, which would indicate that the police station did clean up its act in more recent years, prior to its closure, or at least get better at covering their tracks. There were also good police officers here too, and these stories are not intended to generalise against the whole lot.

 

The upper floors generally have more of the same. It's all wrecked. There's an old vending machine up here though, so that people could get refreshments in between beatings.

 

 

And now onto the best part of any abandoned building, the toilets.

 

 

Still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.

 

 

There's a lot of trashed offices up here.

 

 

With a lot of the offices looking rather samey, and being bored of hearing about how great ketamine is for the 500,000th time, I decided to wrap the adventure up and headed for the attic. 

 

Apparently at one point there was a creepy crime museum up here, filled with all kinds of awesome horrible things, like a bitten off thumb in a jar. There was also apparently a shooting range up here. There's no evidence of any of this stuff now, but perhaps these shelves were part of the crime museum. 

There's also some documents here about "The Innocence Project," which was a drama about wrongful convictions. I haven't been able to find the relevant episodes, but I guess some of them were filmed here too.

 

The scrawling indicates that beyond this door is the old shooting range, and that the range master hasn't been wearing correct ear protection.

 

 

And as you can see, there's definitely been some shooting up going on.

 

The police station closed for good in 2008, although some sources say 2005. What nobody says is why. It's a perfectly good building, but for some reason they decided to seal it up and move the entire cadre of officers to more blander premises. 

 

In 2011 the building was due to be demolished. The council wanted to knock it down and had even started negotiations to sell the site to the university for development. But two days before this was due to happen, the move was blocked in order to save the buildings historic frontage.

Since then, it's just casually rotted away. Plans to convert the police station into flats in 2017 were refused by the council because apparently residents would have dull views. They pulled this flimsy excuse out of their ass after the developers had already sunk £230,000 into the project. The fact that the council would happily let the city keep its eyesore for such a silly reason did not go down well, and has been the source of a very bitter dispute that rages to this day. One councilor who left in 2019 described it as one of the biggest local government scandals of the decade.

And fatigued as I was from having spent so much time with a drug-addled imbecile, that's all I've got. My next blog post will be a prison, because you know this hobby would land me there eventually. And then after that I'll be covering a church as part of my rehabilitation. In the meantime, if you like the blogs then follow my Instagram, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, in the hopes that one of their awful algorithms actually does its job and shows you my updates. 

Thanks for reading!