cane hill | goodbye cane hill
08|08

We held a brief conference in the Administration Block. The southernmost part of the hospital felt the safest, away from the potential discovery by Squibb’s employees and also a good observation point of English Patnership’s guards; one of whom parked his dog van near the entrance to the hospital.

It had been extremely quiet within the complex. With the exception of the dog patrols around the exterior fence, we’d not seen or heard anyone inside or around the buildings. It seemed that we’d picked an extremely good day, and Squibb simply weren’t working, but there was always the possibility of a lone guard, so we were still extremely cautious.

It was decided that the male side of the hospital was too difficult and dangerous to traverse. The demolition had removed all cover and each ward was difficult to enter thanks to a pile of dangerous rubble blocking its corridor. Therefore we decided to work our way up through the more-intact female side and explore each ward in turn.

Our way back to the horseshoe corridor was delayed as I finally discovered Keith’s mysterious basement windows in a courtyard opposite the old dentists. (This was written up separately). Having stopped another mysterious picture turning into an unmerited mystery (as there was no secret liar of old hospital equipment and medical devices) we bypassed the previously explored Browning/Blake and Allen/Andrewes and cautiously ventured into Cruden/Chaucer.

Many explorers had snapped its blacked exteriors, the upper floor an empty shell. An arson attack had destroyed the top storey of the ward and explorers had therefore assumed the ground floor would also be in ruins. However, we crept in to the ground floor to find the former suicide ward still structurally intact; the plaster ceiling had long collapsed after years of rain falling into the empty shell above, but it wasn’t the burnt-out structure we were expecting.


Water damaged remains of Female Ward C day room. (Z5:G.05:SE) © Simon Cornwell 2008