>>Bradley Garrett: When I was young, I used to watch a lot of Indiana Jones movies with
my dad.
That is not the slide I am looking for.
So when I was young, I used to watch a lot of Indiana Jones movies with my dad.
I got really interested in the idea of becoming an archaeologist.
I was always really fascinated by the things human beings leave behind, the threads that
connect us all through time.
And eventually, I got that job as an archaeologist.
And I ended up traveling all over the world.
I excavated sites in Australia, in Mexico, in Hawaii, in Iceland.
And I saw some pretty incredible things.
I remember I was excavating this prehistoric Mayan village site in Mexico once.
We had been there for about three months and we were excavating a lot of pottery.
The thing they never tell you about archaeology in school is it's actually really boring.
You end up digging up the same thing over and over again and bagging it and tagging
it.
I pulled out this one piece of pottery, and there was a fingerprint on it.
And all of a sudden I was a time traveler.
I could actually take that piece of pottery and I could put my thumb in the thumbprint
on the piece of pottery, and I felt like I had this direct connection to this person
who made this pot 1200 years ago.
I think that was probably the best moment of my career.
Unfortunately, moments like that in archaeology were far and few between.
And I felt that what I needed was a more direct connection to history.
I needed more of a sense of adventure in the discoveries that I was making.
So fast forward to 2008, to London.
And I was standing on a bridge over the Thames, staring at Battersea Power Station.
This was the central power station for London from the 1930s to the 1980s.
And I was standing on this bridge with a group of urban explorers, people who were enamored
with the building.
The building had been derelict for over 20 year.
It was left to fall into a state of ruin and decay.
No one was really looking after the building.
Although we were incredibly fascinated by the building and by its history, we were also
frustrated that we couldn't see what was inside the building.
So we solved our curiosity in the obvious way: We hopped the fences, we snuck past the
security guards, and we had a look for ourselves.
And what we found inside was incredible.
We found these breathtaking control rooms that used to be used to shift power across
London.
And they were in a perfect state of preservation.
And I remember being, you know, slightly terrified by what we were doing, but also, I felt this
immense sense of wonder.
I was feeling this really visceral connection to the history of the place.
And it reminded me a bit of being young.
And any of you who have kids, I'm sure you've experienced this, the fascinating and also
frustrating way that they just try things out without any thought, really, to what the
goals or consequences might be; right?
It felt a bit like I was rediscovering some of that childhood energy.
So that moment in Battersea Power Station triggered something in me.
It felt like what I was actually looking for when I was doing archaeology.
I had found an urban exploration, I had found a more direct connection to the past, a past
-- a connection to the past through exploration, through discovery, through adventure; right?
This was the moment that I was looking for so -- essentially, I had found that Indiana
Jones moment.
And what followed was my Ph.D. research, five years of exploration all over the world with
urban explorers into hidden environments.
And eventually, that research would have very severe consequences.
And that's the story that I want to tell you today.
So soon after Battersea, we began sneaking into derelict hospitals that were dotted around
London.
And a lot of these hospitals that we went into, it was -- they were very surreal.
It was like almost as if there had been a rapture or something, as if everyone had been
lifted the day before.
You would find sort of nurses' notes in the stations, and you would find patient records
left behind.
And you could do what you can't do in a museum.
You could dig through all of these things and you could look at them, right, you could
touch everything.
And we also explored derelict industrial areas, areas in Detroit, in London, in Belgium, in
Germany.
And these industrial spaces were perhaps a little closer to us in the past.
You know, these are potentially spaces that our parents and grandparents worked in.
And a lot of times, you would find these pieces of machinery that were sort of too big to
get out of the building.
And they would get left behind.
And these spaces were kind of collapsing and being reclaimed by nature.
And we became slightly obsessed with getting these photographs of kind of intertwining
nature and culture in these spaces.
And then we kept traveling further east from London, and eventually, we found the remains
of the Soviet Union.
And this particular photo here is from a village called Vogelsang.
It was a Soviet military base that housed 12,000 troops at one time.
And there were -- we found a -- nuclear launch pads in this site.
And when I went to a village that was still inhabited very close to here and I asked people
about the base, they had no idea that it was even there.
So a couple of things occurred to me.
I mean, first, the first thing that occurred to me is that a lot of these places that we
had photographed just a few years on, they were annihilated, they were gone, they were
knocked down and redeveloped into other things.
And very often, the photographs that we had taken were the best forms of documentation
that existed of these spaces.
So you can imagine as an archaeologist, I found this absolutely fascinating, right,
that these urban explorers were doing this in their own time, and very often, they were
doing a better job recording these buildings than the government I used to work for doing
archaeology.
But the other thing that occurred to me that I found equally fascinating is that we all
tend to think that we live in a world that is mapped and known, largely because of Google.
But it turns out that the world is still full of mysteries.
The world is still full of places that are, for all intents and purposes, off the map.
There are still places that can be found.
However, as a -- as a researcher, I felt that it was important to add a level of critique
to the discussion about what we were doing.
So I started talking to these urban explorers about whether what we were doing was really
a kind of guerrilla archaeology, whether this was in the public interest or whether what
we were in fact doing was fetishizing other people's misfortune.
Was there something neocolonial about this project?
And it was in the context of that conversation that we were coming back from -- we were coming
back from Eastern Europe, and we were scrolling around on Google Earth, and we found a ruin
that would change our thinking forever.
So, basically, what had happened is that in the 1970s, Antwerp started extending their
Metro system.
But because of political issues, they never finished it.
And we knew that the Metro system existed somewhere underground, but we didn't know
how to access it.
So, of course, Google Earth helped us, and we found this shaft in the ground that we
thought might lead to that Metro system.
So, again, there was only one way to find out.
We ab sailed down the hole.
It ended up being 30 meters deep.
When we dropped into the hole, we actually had no idea whether we were going to be able
to come out again.
But, you know, if we knew what was going to happen, it wouldn't be exploration; right?
When we got to the bottom of this 30-meter shaft, we had, in fact, found the remains
of this Metro system.
And walking through here was incredible.
There were a dozen miles of tunnel.
There were seven stations that were never put into service.
I mean, it was a Metro system with everything except the tracks and trains; right?
It was an incredible discovery.
And we had this conversation as we were walking through here about whether this was a ruin
or an unfinished construction site.
And we started having the discussion about whether we might be able to find similar things
in London; right?
There have ton secrets like this in London that we could find.
So over the next couple of years, we came back to London and started exploring all of
these spaces.
And I don't know if you remember that moment in the Wizard of Oz where they pull back that
curtain and find that this whole elaborate plot that they've been involved in, it was
all controlled by a little old man pulling strings.
It felt a little bit like that, revealing all of the kind of secret inner workings of
the city.
But there was also -- As we saw these places, we also gained great respect for these urban
planners and engineers and architects who took incredible risks to build this infrastructure
that cities now rely on.
Of course now, today, we can build infrastructure like tunnels much more efficiently than people
could 150 years ago when they were building the sewer systems or the Tube in London.
But we also build really boring infrastructure right now.
It's not that interesting to look at.
And when we went into some of the old infrastructure of the city, what we found was that it was
striking.
It was incredibly beautiful, because they -- I think because they were taking risks,
they wanted to make sure that people wanted to see these structures.
They wanted these structures to be seen.
And of course over time, we've forgotten them.
So this became our mission, to kind of reveal the hidden structures of the city and to share
them with people.
So this is a London sewer system.
This was built in the 1850s by sir Joseph Bazzalgette.
The London sewers today were essentially old rivers of London and they were covered over.
This system is built out of 318 million hand-laid bricks, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
But more than that, when Bazzalgette built this system there was a cholera epidemic in
London, and by building this system, Bazzalgette saved millions of lives.
Bazzalgette is a hero of history; right?
But the whole kind of history that he created has been buried under the city.
So it kind of felt like in going into the sewers, we revealed that man behind the curtain
again.
We also had electricity tunnels, so these tunnels have all the sort of telecommunications
and fiberoptics.
And again, these are the threads that are moving all our data and communication across
the city.
We found these old bunkers, these World War II bunkers that used to be connected to the
Tube.
So during World War II when the Luftwaffe were dropping bombs on London, they could
evacuate people from the Tube into these deep-level shelters, and many of them still had the original
signage in there.
This space over here was pretty exceptional.
That's called Kings Way Telephone Exchange, and it was a telephone exchange built during
the cold war with public funds, and the public had no idea that it was being built or that
it existed after it was built.
And this was -- essentially, this would preserve all of the communications in the event of
an attack, a nuclear attack on London.
Of coursing in that bunker, I couldn't help but remember those launch pads at Vogelsang;
right?
And think again about those threads that connect us, not just through space but through time.
But our imaginations in the city didn't just stretch down, they stretched up, because in
moving from thinking about the ruins of the past to the infrastructure of the present,
we also started thinking about the future of cities; right?
And the future of cities is always going to be a skyward prospect.
And so we started climbing onto skyscrapers and revealing the view from various places.
Seeing bridges, like the Fourth Rail Bridge, that are incredible feats of engineering up
close and personal, climbing down them.
And in 2012, we even climbed a mothballed skyscraper on Las Vegas Boulevard called Fontainebleau.
And this photo here, I basically stitched together five photos, and you can see me up
in the corner up there, and it's one of the most incredible views I've ever seen.
A couple of interesting things happened when we started posting these photos.
One is other explorers started to get in touch with us all over the world wanting to share
their spaces with us.
So we started traveling and sharing information.
But the other thing that happened is the owners of these properties would very often get in
touch and say, "Can we use your photos to promote our views," or "Would you mind linking
our Web site to yours because we see you're getting a lot of traffic," you know, which
was not quite the response we were expecting, but, you know, people understood why we'd
want to see these views.
So it would be great if I could leave it there, but, unfortunately, this isn't an entirely
happy story.
We had been sneaking into the London Underground for a couple of years into these abandoned
Tube stations.
We basically took a 1932 Tube map and we compared it to a 2012 Tube map and there were stations
that were missing, and we photographed every one of these hidden stations, and Transport
for London didn't appreciate this.
Obviously we had revealed certain security breaches in getting into these places.
But more than that, there seemed to be a sense that Transport for London felt that these
were their spaces.
They owned them.
They didn't want photos of these things being published.
So in 2012 I was coming back from Cambodia on a research trip, and my plane was stopped
on the runway at Terminal 3 at Heathrow, and British Transport police boarded the plane
and arrested me.
And while I was in custody they took a battering ram to my front door and they confiscated
all my property, my computers.
Everything that could hold data they took me from.
My computers, my hard drives, my phones.
And of course as a researcher, this was devastating for me, both because that research was necessary
for me to sort of do my job, but also because I had confidentiality agreements with my project
participants.
We had certain guidelines in place that were being breached by the arrest.
So eventually I was charged, along with 11 other explorers, with conspiracy to commit
criminal damage, which is classified as a thought crime.
The British Transport police wanted to stop us from exploring the city, and that's why
they charged us with this thought crime.
My passport was confiscated when I was arrested, and I was actually stuck in the United Kingdom
for two years waiting to get to trial, where the case rapidly fell apart, as we all expected.
The back story here is that I was actually invited to give this talk two years ago at
Zeitgeist.
[ Laughter ] They bought me a plane ticket and everything.
I couldn't get on the plane.
And then they invited me back in 2013.
I couldn't get on the plane.
They invited me back this year.
And after some very intense legal wrangling, I was able to get out of the United Kingdom.
[ Applause ] Thanks, yeah.
So I'm very happy to be home.
It just remains to be seen whether it was a one-way ticket.
[ Laughter ] Exploring cities is important, I think.
Exploring, in general, is important.
And you'll get now that it wasn't exploring or necessarily taking photos that got me arrested.
It was sharing information.
It was doing what I'm doing now.
Because in doing so, I exposed some faults in the security of the city, but I also raised
a really important conversation, I think, about what we have access to and what we don't.
There are boundaries being circumscribed around our existence in urban environments more and
more.
And one of the things that urban exploration has the capability of doing is -- is a capability
of revealing those boundaries.
And I guess getting here, you know, and going through all of the border checks and having
flags put on my passport and my ability to travel limited, it occurred to me that many
of us are living in prison all the time.
Even though I didn't go to prison for what I did, my mobility was restricted and I wasn't
able to travel and do my job.
And I just -- I think that, you know, creativity is important.
We all want to live in creative cities; right?
Where people can push boundaries, where people can try things out, where people can make
mistakes.
And increasingly we're living in cities where we're not able to do that.
And so I think urban exploration, it speaks back to that in an important way.
And it tells us that, you know, exploring the world has the ability to reveal those
boundaries but also has the ability to make the city a more creative place, a more interesting
place.
And I think these explorations that we undertook and the stories that we've been able to tell
were worth with despite the consequences.
Thanks very much.
[ Applause ]