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Abandoned, Disused & Ruined Places

I'm sure that's the terminal which appears in Italian 70's movies whenever the hero flies over to NY...
 
It reminded me a lot of the Men in Black headquarters.
 
Abandoned 'Chicken Church' in Indonesian Jungle

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I walk past this relic nearly every day. The sign reads "Federation of Railway Clubs - Alwyn Hall Social Club". It's just round the corner from the train station, so I assume it was once a watering hole for railway workers.

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It's been abandoned for at least the last 15 years or so, but demolition is finally under way. They've gutted it leaving only the outer wall standing, but now seem to have downed tools.

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I tried looking up its history online but couldn't find anything. It's still listed as a venue on various online directories, though, and I dare say it still will be long after it's been knocked down completely and replaced with bijou flats.
 
Drake's Island Plymouth

Privately owned but not used for years, though there are development plans for hotel/resort/events venue.

A lot of ex-military buildings of various dates, some still in reasonable condition, and a gun battery building with impressive vaults, some of which were used in a children's tv show in the 90s.

Worth scrolling down as it's in several parts with lots of photos. Also on that page is a disused Nuclear Bunker & Deep Air Raid Shelter, also in Plymouth.
 
I was having borscht for lunch and it seemed natural to find out more about "The Borscht Belt."

Seems it is yesterday's news but some of the old places rot poetically.*

A fascinating slice of social history. The resorts grew as a response to antisemitism elsewhere in American hotels and clubs. They were killed by the spread of air-conditioning and the rise of jet travel. :huh:

*Warning: This illustrated feature contains scenes of Dirty Dancing. :confused:
 
An abandoned shop on the Prince of Wales Road, Norwich

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This busy road leading to the city centre is like catnip to the regions lads and ladettes, being a hub of clubs, bars, takeaways and off licences. There's even a lap dancing club just opposite.

I can only assume the property must be tied up in legal shenanigans, as otherwise it would surely have become a kebab shop long ago.
 
We used to live around the corner from this church, about twenty years ago. In those days it was well attended - but for years now it has languished behind locked gates with great drifts of litter banking up against it. It really deserves preservation, could easily be re-purposed, as a community facility or cafe or arts-centre (there's lots down my way.) But I fear it'll be yet another small block of cookie-cutter flats before very long.
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Nice bit of architecture. Old churches like that often get their basic structure preserved and are turned into houses.
There's one in the town where I live. Looks like a small Methodist or Baptist chapel, but it's a house.
 
Back in the early 1990s, I viewed and was tempted to buy an apartment in the proposed conversion of this place:

Monastery of St. Francis.

I'm glad I didn't. The company went bust a few months later and the rest of the history is on the site.

"Gorton Monastery placed on World Monuments Fund Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites in the World alongside Pompeii, Taj Mahal and Valley of the Kings."

On the other hand, it is Gorton. :eek:
 
graylien said:
Abandoned 'Chicken Church' in Indonesian Jungle
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What an amazing building. Does anyone else feel that from both inside and out, it looks and feels like a wingless aircraft? Or at least like some form of vehicle...a giant Chinook or C17, from the inside.

If I were a person of faith, I might be embarrased or shocked by this enterprise.

The immortal words "God has sent me a vision...we must build an (insert deified non-random project here)" must've echoed down the building plots of time. My fevered insanity is my certainty, and yours is currently yours. But, if I attract more adherents than you, mine becomes an establishment orthodoxy, your's becomes a heresy. I can build temples to a civic monopolised set-style, shaped like an animal/bird/aircraft, within which people are 'born'/married/'die', and it becomes a franchise. Everyone that is part of that belief-clan can never see the shape of the church building they are in, because it is part of them....almost the Church of McDonalds. And those non-believers, the Chicken Churchers of KFC (blessed be the Colonel, and his secret recipe), over the next hill, they will never see the hallowed golden arches. No-one comes to the father except via Ronald.....

Note that the shape of the bird building is still vaguely church-like....no steeple, but a head for a tower. No wings or 'wings' (apse/nave), but I wonder if it was built along quasi-pagan Judeo- Christian compass alignments (such as facing sunrise on Beltaine, or suchlike?)

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Remember these? This one just outside the city centre of Norwich has been abandoned for a good couple of years now. As you can see, they haven't even got round to clearing the shelving out. I expect this will end up being turned into a takeaway.

 
graylien said:
Remember these? This one just outside the city centre of Norwich has been abandoned for a good couple of years now. As you can see, they haven't even got round to clearing the shelving out. I expect this will end up being turned into a takeaway.

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The colours used there - blue, gold and white, hmmm... Reminds me of the TV quiz show, Blockbusters. I think I`ll have a `S` please bob, to make things right again. What S proceeds the word `FOR` and refers to an empty building or premises?
 
Amazing that the windows are still intact.
 
With its flat roof design it could easily be made into one of those potentially dangerous pubs.
 
GeorgeP said:
With its flat roof design it could easily be made into one of those potentially dangerous pubs.
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You mean, like a helicopter landing pad?
 
I wasn't trying to make a joke with that comment, actually.
I was making a grim observation.
 
I was looking for videostore memorabilia online earlier this week. It is a piece of recent history that is not well documented - apart from sites devoted to pre-cert. horrors. Mainstream video rental is remembered nostalgically in a lot of forums but it is not illustrated as much as I would like.

Blockbuster arrived in the early to mid-nineties and more or less obliterated the other chains and local stores. My early-nineties borrowings were from stores called Titles and Ritz. When BB arrived, they "rationalized" quite drastically. The competition was not from downloading - the DVD had yet to arrive! - but the falling price of buy-for-keeps videos. DVD gave rental-stores a shot-in-the-arm but digital technology eventually rendered their EPOS-based profit-sharing model obsolete.

One of my favourite academic papers proposed that Blockbuster were merely imitating an early nineteenth-century model where commercial lending-libraries persuaded publishers to supply them at a discount for a share in the profits. How it worked without barcodes was not explained.

VHS tapes can now be acquired by the handful for the price on a single night's rental in 1993 - which is where I came in! I think the decline in my own enthusiasm came when I had exhausted any interesting back-catalogue titles they carried and found little to detain me in the new releases. Besides, it was still possible up until the mid-nineties, to furnish a pretty good collection of classic films from BBC2 and Channel 4. :rolleyes:
 
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Noticed tonight my local (defunct) Blockbuster, which used to be a Ritz, is now going to be a Pizza Hut. That'll be nice for the area with its fifteen million other fast food places. Just relishing seeing the Ritz sign still up there while I can.
 
GNC said:
Noticed tonight my local (defunct) Blockbuster, which used to be a Ritz, is now going to be a Pizza Hut. That'll be nice for the area with its fifteen million other fast food places. Just relishing seeing the Ritz sign still up there while I can.
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See if you can blag the Ritz signage before it's thrown into a skip. I do that sort of thing all the time :) ... they'll probably just give it to you then you can decide if it's going in garden or indoors.
 
Surprised nobody's thought of that! Nostalgia ain't what it used to be...
 
GNC said:
Surprised nobody's thought of that! Nostalgia ain't what it used to be...
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In the early 90s, there used to be a chain of French-style cafes in the south of England called Dome - think Cafe Rouge, very similar produce and decor (all late C19 Parisian, Art Deco Martini and Chat Noir posters) - anyway, they folded as a franchise in the mid 90s, and when the one in Clifton closed, I nicely asked if I could have some of the posters that were going to be otherwise dumped - after a bit of negotiation with the manager I got about a dozen for a tenner. I ended up selling most of them on Ebay a few years ago and got a fair bit of profit. I kept one 1930's Italian Martini and one Parisian Grand Guignol, both now sadly lost and each with a glimmer of irony, the former had a drunken incident with flung ragu - don't ask - and the latter was clawed to death by the cat.
 
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