Afterlives

Afterlives

What happens to a building when everybody stops arguing about it. Roofless halls, flooded basements, and birch trees growing where the floor used to be.

Afterlives began in 2017 and covers mills in the Borders, a sanatorium outside Perth, two churches, a brickworks and a very large number of farm steadings, nearly all in Scotland and the north of England. Access is arranged in every single case; nothing here was climbed into. The rule is that a building only enters the project once it has been empty long enough for something to be growing in it, which in practice means about six years.

Running since2017
FramesAbout 380
SitesForty, in Scotland and the north of England
Entry ruleEmpty long enough for something to be growing in it — about six years
Since photographedNine demolished, two converted
A derelict mill with ferns growing from every window ledge
Mill, Scottish Borders. Ferns on every ledge of the east elevation.
An empty industrial hall with the roof partly open and daylight landing on a floor of moss
Weaving shed, Galashiels. The floor is moss to about an inch deep.
A staircase to nowhere with its treads intact and ivy on the wall behind
Sanatorium, near Perth. The stair is sound; the floors it served are not.
A collapsed roof structure seen from below, timbers against sky
Steading, Aberdeenshire. Photographed eight days before it came down.

A building under construction is full of intention and a building in use is full of compromise. This is the third state, and it is the only one nobody designed. Ivy does not care what the elevation was meant to say. I keep coming back because these rooms are the calmest places I have ever stood in, and because in six years' time most of them will be a car park or a house, which is fine, and worth having looked at first.

A stone doorway with a young tree growing squarely through it
Doorway, Fife. The birch is roughly the age of the closure.
A flooded basement with still water reflecting the vaulting above it
Flooded vault, Dundee. Ankle deep and perfectly still. Available as a print.
A row of empty window openings in a long wall seen square on, sky through each
Openings, Galashiels. Nineteen of them. Available as a print.
A grand stair hall with the plaster gone, brick showing, light from a hole in the roof
Stair hall, near Perth. The plaster came off in one winter.
A rusted gantry crane inside a roofless shed with grass beneath it
Gantry, Clydebank. Still runs, apparently.
A chapel interior with the pews gone and one shaft of light on a bare altar step
Chapel, Ayrshire. Deconsecrated 1994. Available as a print.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Wemyss Housing Association estates team, who arranged access to eleven of these sites and insisted on coming along to every one; to Mairi Corrigal, who found the sanatorium and the brickworks and who is better at this than I am; and to Tam Redgorton, for the ladder, the tetanus advice, and for pointing out that the birch in the doorway was the same age as the closure notice.