Long time, no industrial estates

It shook me to my core to discover that there was an industrial estate on my doorstep that I had not explored and one Sunday morning I took a little walk around it and took the new to me Pentax 6x7 to shoot a test roll. The estate in question is a bit different to others that I’ve visited, usually they’re just roads with units dotted about the place but this one was more of a single site with an access road that ran between various warehouses. There were quite a few signs up telling me that I probably shouldn’t be there but no one told me to leave, the only other people I encountered looked somewhat lost, perhaps they were just unable to comprehend why someone would be wandering around such a place with a camera.

It doesn’t feel like 5 years ago that I made my first zine entitled ‘Industrial Landscapes’ but it’s definitely something I’d like to revisit at some point. I’m quite happy with some of these photos but I often feel like I need to spend more time thinking about the photo I’m about to take but for whatever reason always feel a bit rushed. Perhaps it’s the fear of being chased by security, captured and interrogated about what I’m up to and why I’m still shooting film in 2025. Maybe it’s the realisation that with the rise in AI and inevitable overthrowing of the human race, industrial estates will be obsolete and instead I’ll be roaming sites of data centres and fending off security drones.

I digress, the future of this particular industrial estate is no doubt more likely to be another soulless housing estate so really I’m doing the city a great service by creating a visual record before it is bulldozed to the ground. Maybe decades from now they’ll uncover my negatives and either hold them in local high regard à la George Plunkett, or possibly more likely, wonder why someone would take photos of such boring things and file them away in the bin.

Enough waffling, here’s some photos.