Parklands Prison May 2016

mookster · Jun 1, 2016

I'm getting into the latter stages of my trip now, but some of the best stuff was saved until last.

In my almost seven years of exploring I had never done a prison, even my four or five previous trips to continental Europe hadn't included 15H or H15 or whatever it's getting called this week. So as you can imagine I was stoked I was finally going to be able to explore one.

This place only closed down a few years ago, before becoming a prison it was a state school for the developmentally disabled (read: a place like an asylum complex but worse) which shut down and was then purchased by the prison service. The grounds are now a public park, which means exactly what it says - the public are free to wander around and relax on the neatly kept parklands around the abandoned prison buildings still surrounded with their tall razor wire-topped fences. Amateur sports teams play on the old prison games fields surrounded by razor wire and there is a school bus assembling plant leasing some of the old maintenance sheds.

We got into two of the buildings, the largest main one has just had a new fence put around it which meant it was a no go so we stuck to the second largest and it's annex. I had no ideas what to expect stepping foot inside, needless to say I was very pleasantly surprised as although empty the peeling decay was off the charts thanks to America's love of leaded paint which peels like a dream. There were areas which were very definitely prison-esque and others that really didn't look like one at all but I guess that came with it's former use.

Apologies in advance for the quality of some of the photos, I had temporarily misplaced my tripod by leaving it in my friend's girlfriend's car so they were all taken handheld at some very high ISO levels, and we were very time limited here so it was a rush around and nuts to composition kind of explore.