Over the course of seven years, a well-respected team of adventurers has embarked on scores of not-quite-legal investigations inside, below, and above the city s hidden infrastructures. Their first book published by Prestel, Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital, took readers under the city. Now, they reveal the results of their expeditions scaling the city s heights. Jaw-dropping photographs offer extraordinary views from vantage points that most of us will never reach. Divided into thematic chapters, the book offers personal accounts of various excursions, including travels up freestanding masts, pylons, and chimneys; the tops of public spaces such as the Barbican Centre and the British Museum; voyeuristic glimpses over the rooftop gardens of the rich and famous; and the heights of London starchitecture : the Gherkin, the Shard, and the Walkie-Talkie. Each chapter includes a new artwork by illustrator Lizzie Mary Cullen, who specializes in urban psycho-cartography. This London urban exploration crew s exploits in procuring these photos have received extensive coverage in the worldwide press. Readers will enjoy these indefatigable explorers quest to make their native city both known and accessible to anyone who shares their curiosity.Includes a foreword by McKenzie Wark.
As the world rapidly urbanizes, its cities sink themselves into the ground in sprawling tendons of tunnels – conduits for transport, utilities, communication, shelter and storage. The excavation of these spaces, at ever-increasing depths and speed, has changed our lives in ways that we tend to take for granted. This is the first book to chart the global reach of urban underground spaces, bringing together a collection of 80 stories of subterranean sites around the world. The book draws out the extraordinary range of meanings suggested by urban underground spaces, whether their power as places of hope, fear, memory, labour and resistance, or their capacity to evoke both long histories and futures in the making.
Illustrated with often breathtaking photographs, Global Undergrounds creates a new sense of the richness and global diversity of urban underground spaces. Its breadth and depth will appeal to all those who are engaged with these spaces: from urban planners, geographers, architects and engineers to urban explorers, photographers and anyone who encounters underground spaces in their cities. Indeed, we inhabit a world where the material stuff beneath our feet is constantly in flux, where layer upon layer of things, people and substances circulate, dream and dwell.
Review of Global Undergrounds in Descent Magazine:
Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital will be release in October 2014 and is now available for pre-order. This collection of extraordinary images from beneath London’s streets will fascinate anyone interested in what lies under the surface of one of the world’s greatest cities.
Peel back the layers under a London street and you’ll discover a haunting, dreamlike world of hand-laid brick sewers, forgotten tube stations, World War II evacuation shelters, secret government bunkers, and tunnel boring machines laying new sewer, communication, and transport grids. Bradley L.Garrett has worked with explorers of subterranean London to collect an astonishing array of images documenting forbidden infiltrations into the secret bowels of the city. This book takes readers through progressively deeper levels of historical London architecture below the streets. Beautifully designed to allow for detailed viewing and featuring bespoke map illustrations by artist Stephen Walter, this unique book takes readers to locations few dare to go, and even fewer succeed in accessing.
Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City is now on shelves at your local bookstore. You can also order your copy on Amazon. It is assumed that every inch of the world has been explored and charted; that there is nowhere new to go. But perhaps it is the everyday places around us—the cities we live in—that need to be rediscovered. What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure.
Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity.
Explore Everything is an account of the author’s escapades with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective. The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis.
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Reviews of Explore Everything
– Theo Kindynis Crime Media Culture