ENTREPOT DES ELEPHANTS
An abandoned warehouse is to an urban explorer like honey to a bee: irresistible. It often turns out to be an empty warehouse (which can also be nice). In other cases, the warehouse is filled with junk or completely vandalized. And very occasionally you bump into something you didn't expect at all... A collection of vintage cars, a rusty machine park,... or a bunch of elephants!
When Lille became "European Capital of Culture" in 2004, its activities and exhibitions attracted a tourist crowd that the town had never seen before. A few years later they tried to repeat that success with the creation of "Lille 3000"; a biennial cultural event around a specific theme. The first edition started with an international exhibition, with the rich Indian culture as its central theme. To add luster to the exhibition, 20 gigantic statues of colorfully decorated Indian elephants were brought over from India. These fiberglass elephants surrounding a metal frame were designed by one of Bollywood's most renowned film production designers, Nitin Chandrakant Desai. The 20 colossi were arranged in a kind of guard of honor along one of the city's main streets, which leads to the opera house.
(Photo credit PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP via Getty Images)
From October 2006 to January 2007, the impressive colossi dominated the street scene. They were then disassembled and shipped to India. At least... 18 of the 20 returned to their home country. However, two elephants were left orphaned and are now in an abandoned shed, surrounded by some paraphernalia left behind after the city's Indian adventure...
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MOULIN DUCHESSE
'Remarkable' is the least you can say about this peculiar location. The buildings are filled almost to the brim with all kinds of old trinkets. In some places it looks a bit like a museum...
The history of this castle mill dates back to the beginning of the thirteenth century. However, at the end of the sixteenth century the mill fell into disrepair, partly as a result of the religious wars that raged during this period. It wasn't until around 1630 the mill was finally rebuilt. The construction of the water mill, this time in unsustainable wood and with a straw roof, took almost 8 years. Barely thirty years later it had to be rebuilt again, this time in brick and with a shale roof. This construction would last for more than 200 years.
At the end of the 19th century, the need to rebuild became apparent again. The current buildings largely date from this period. The entire mill complex was built in the same style and consists of the actual mill building followed by the miller's house. Behind this are the stables, the attics of which served as accommodation for the mulders' servants.
The last miller stopped grinding in 1963. Until then, the mill was used as a bakery mill, a farmer's mill and for personal use. The watermill has been silent ever since and has been remarkably well preserved (except for the waterwheel itself, which is missing several wooden blades).
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ALIENWORKS
Abandoned steelworks power plant.
This iron and steel factory is a former blast furnace cast iron factory, built in 1890 by a German family business. The factory specialized in the production of pig iron, made from local iron ore.
Thanks to the company's continuous modernization, its ideal location in the French steel basin and the restructuring of the steel industry, the company concentrated its entire production of French cast iron in the mid-1960s.
Despite all these favorable criteria and technical innovations, the company, like all other steel companies, suffered seriously from the crisis in the steel industry in the 1970s. The company managed to survive for a while, but was forced to announce its closure in the early 1990s.
Part of the site, including the blast furnace itself, was preserved as industrial heritage.
In this series of photos you see the power plant that was part of the blast furnace company. It is a classic power plant, with turbines from Brown Boveri and AEG, among others, driven by steam that was produced in the adjacent boiler room.
The site is well secured and difficult to access, which also explains why it has been preserved in its current beautiful state.
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TAPIOCA FARM
Abandoned farm.
Tapioca Farm, aptly named so due to the presence of lots of tapioca in the kitchen cabinets, is arguably one of the oldest locations in urban exploring terms. The old farm has been abandoned for decades, but is still going strong!
For some reason, this picturesque farm has been spared from thieves and vandals. That in itself is remarkable in the current urbex scene.
Even though it was spared from the visits of people with bad intentions, natural decay continues steadily. The building has had to withstand so much moisture and mold that restoration is no longer an option.
Why it was abandoned in the first place and why nobody is looking out for it after all these years, I could not tell you. I wasn't able to find any information on the buildings' history or its previous owners...
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HASARD CHERATTE REVISITED
I visited this abandoned coal mine seven years ago. It was one of my very first explores of an industrial site. The steep descent to enter the site immediately brought back a lot of memories... You can watch the result of that first visit here: Hasard Cheratte OG. The site itself has since changed considerably...
The contraption you see on the photos above, is in fact the turbine that hoisted the elevator out of the mine shaft. For some reason I didn't make it to the top level on my first visit, so I made sure to climb all the way up this time. And boy, was it worth it...
Shortly after the mine closed in 1977, the site was purchased for next to nothing by the Flemish industrialist Armand Lowie. He almost immediately started dismantling the old coal mine. Some of the old mining machines irrevocably disappeared into the scrap metal... Fortunately, the Walloon government intervened quickly and protected a number of the buildings and their contents. This unleashed a polemic between the new owner and the Walloon government that had lasted almost thirty years. From that moment on, nothing moved on the site at all. No more demolition works, but also no attempt at reconversion or restoration of the remaining buildings. Only deterioration and decay...
At the beginning of 2012, Armand Lowie died unexpectedly and Hasard Cheratte once again returned to the Walloon government after expropriation. Barely a year later, a remediation plan was proposed, in which the now protected buildings would be retained and the rest demolished. From 2017 - about a year after my first visit - the remediation works started, starting with the removal of asbestos and the demolition of the extraction tower of shaft no. 3. A scaffolding was built around the listed buildings of shaft no. 1, suggesting that the restoration work were taken seriously.
As suddenly as they started, the restoration work came to an end. The scaffolding disappeared, as did every activity on the site. At the time of my second visit, there is precious little sign of new life for the beautiful mine site...
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MAGASIN DE PEINTURE
From the outside view of this corner house, you wouldn't expect the huge property behind the facade. I wasn't able to find anything about the history of the building or its owners, but from what I saw it had clearly been a shop. At the back of the house I came across the cutest little paint shop... As is often the case with these old abandoned houses, that don't really have any architectural or historical value, it was torn down to make way for a new apartment building.
I am in general not the biggest fan of abandoned houses. Usually these places are quickly ransacked by thieves looking for valuables, followed closely by fake urbexers, who create all kinds of tasteless to downright ridiculous scenes in order to have supposedly "original photos". A set table (including filled wine glasses), a gracefully displayed dress or other trinkets, a pair of slippers placed in front of a chair, family photos fanned out on a side table... As if anyone in their right mind would dally up their house like that, just to promptly leave it all behind.
This house seems to have been relatively spared from all that nonsense. Probably also partly due to the fact that the floors in some of the rooms were in such a rotten state that they were no longer safe to walk on or had even already collapsed altogether...
Behind the house and the paint shop I found a huge warehouse where the main feature was a beautifully preserved iconic Barkas van. All in all quite a fun explore...
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TRAINWORKS
The history of the Liège steel industry goes back further than the birth of Belgium in 1830. In 1817, the Englishman John Cockerill founded his first steelworks in Seraing to produce the steel for his looms. In the following decades, the steel industry develops to its peak, until it takes its first hits in the early 1980s. The majority of the steel activity in Liège and Charleroi is then brought together in Cockerill Sambre. Several blast furnaces, coking plants, coal mines, hot and cold rolling mills, factories for processing blast furnace slag,... dominated the Walloon economy for almost 200 years.
Various mergers and acquisitions attempted to revive the declining steel industry. When the Indian steel giant Mittal came on the scene in 2006 and took over Arcelor to form ArcelorMittal, the end was near. Numerous layoffs and austerity measures followed, much to the dismay of workers and unions. In 2013, after years of social unrest and negotiations, the curtain finally fell on the Liège steel industry. Some companies are still being placed "under cocoon", with the prospect of a potential restart, which unfortunately never comes...
This site contains the administrative buildings, where the main administration of the steel company was located. The main building still contains a number of beautifully dilapidated offices and archives.
Apart from the administrative wing, there is also a large part of the site where there is a workshop where the company's trains were maintained and repaired. This part was mostly emptied.
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