the great hall

After many Rooms, Communal Areas

and other strange and freaky locations,

we found our first waypoint:

The Great Hall

I make no apologies for the huge pictures on this page (although I have lowered the pixel area on some to speed up loading). This Hall is absolutely awesome, so do it justice..... open the page and go make a nice cup of tea, so that you can sit and savour the place in it's all its glory!

ABOVE: On the first (Rekke) trip that Ghost, Rick and Agent Skyframe made to the site, we didn't have a map of the blocks with us and so had to navigate using the Water Tower (more of this later) as a reference point, which was quite difficult because it looks almost identical from 3 different sides! As we entered the site from the greenhouse in the south-eastern corner and investigated the eastern side of the block, it took us a while to find the Main Hall. By the second trip, we were far better prepared and because we now understood the labarynthine corridors a bit better, we found it reasonably quickly.

The Hall is more or less central in the block and as a result, you tend to get tantalising little glimpses but have to struggle like hell to find the bloody thing......

ABOVE: The area under the stage - linked into the service tunnels (more on these later). As can be seen, the stairs (from where we were when we found the Hall) up to the Hall stage are missing.

BELOW: Looking through the doorway in the opposite direction (the right rather than to the left), we caught our first glimpse of the fantastic Hall.

.....but when you do eventually find it, the rewards are quite stunning.

ABOVE: More stunning grafitti on the wall behind the stage. The message under the central picture reads: "Welcome to Hellingly". I'm not sure about the winged messenger with the handgun, or the 2 dobermen, but it is a fabulous picture. The monster on the right is quite eerie.

ABOVE: As I have said before, there is a huge amount of grafitti at Hellingly; some run of the mill stuff, some very appropriate and remarkably sympathetic, but all very colourful and works of art whatever your take on grafitti.

This has to be my favourite in the entire building. I have christened him "The Guardian" and I am pretty sure he was created by renowned artist Req. I would dearly love to adopt this image as the logo for our organisation, but have thus far been unable to contact Req to find his asking price!

Absolute genious and so appropriate....

ABOVE & BELOW: This is the view from The Flys, about 2/3rds of the way up. There is a whole complete floor above this (with a see-through floor) which I can't even look up at, it makes me feel nervous.

ABOVE & LEFT: Above the stage area of the Great Hall is a series of walkways and stepladders leading up to The Flys, the area above the stage from where lights and scenery would be hung. Ghost suffers badly from vertigo and so went to have a lay down at this point (the photos shown here are all around 30 foot up and the floor area is see-through) and I couldn't even bear to watch anyone else go up there, let alone ascend myself!

The little doorway seen here leads into a void above the roof of The Hall.

BELOW: A number of arson attempts had been made on The Hall. Indeed, the day before our rekke visit, someone had put a torch to the area under the stage and in front of the back wall. Luckily, the fire was found by Urban Explorers like us and the fire brigade was called anonymously before it spread too much.