Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City

by Bradley L. Garrett

Plotting adventures from Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Paris, and London, uncovering the tunnels below the city as well as scaling the highest skyscrapers, Bradley Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in new ways beyond the conventional boundaries of everyday life. Explore Everything is both an account of his escapades with the London Consolidation Crew as well as an urbanist manifesto on rights to the city and new ways of belonging in and understanding the metropolis. It is a passionate declaration to "explore everything," combining philosophy, politics and adventure.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Adventure, Counter Culture, Journalism, History, Biography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Bradley Garrett is a cultural geographer, writer and photographer based between Los Angeles and Dublin. He holds a PhD from the University of London in the UK and has worked at the University of Oxford and the University of Sydney. He has written for the Atlantic, Guardian, Financial Times, GQ, and Vox and has published over 50 academic journal articles and book chapters. Dr Garrett's work has been featured on worldwide media outlets, including National Geographic, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC. He has been an invited speaker on the Joe Rogan Experience, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, the Google Zeitgeist annual summit in the USA, and at the Tate Modern and Barbican galleries in the UK.

Reviews

[Stewart Home · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bradley Garrett’s book is about how the author (an American post-graduate student) got involved with a bunch of people into so-called ‘urban exploration’ (UE) and committed trespass to visit sites not necessarily open to the public in London and elsewhere. Bradley has all the typical methodological hang-ups of an academic and this really gets in the way at the beginning and end of the book (not that I’m against methodology per se – but I do have issues with academic methodology). Leaving aside the prologue and introductory first chapter, the book kicks off with some tedious accounts of visits to abandoned buildings that are mixed up with tiresome academic soul searching. Explore Everything picks up when the cops start putting the heat on the group Bradley is involved with (London Consolidation Crew) for going into the tube after it has closed at night to visit ghost stations (among other things). When pressure from the authorities transforms ‘participant observation’ into simple participation, the prose is less congealed and at its best started to remind me of the privately circulated reports of the Workshop for a Non-Linear Architecture (WNLA) of the 1990s. The 70 odd pages that make up the chapter ‘Grails Of The Underground’ is entertaining and informative, most of the rest of the book isn’t.

Much of what Bradley describes self–identifying ‘urban explorers’ as doing has been going on for years but without the UE label attached to it (and seemingly without Bradley having heard about it, since he doesn’t mention any of the activities in this area that most interest me). In the mid-1990s the Glasgow drifts of the WNLA (including uncovering and penetrating buried streets and breaking into the city’s ruins) were mostly thought of as psychogeography. I’m not aware of anyone applying the term urban exploration to WNLA activities at the time but their activities were a perfect fit for this later label. I guess at most they handed out their privately circulated reports to a few dozen people – but word of what they were doing got around. Likewise, there are activities now described as ‘urban exploration’ that in the past were just something people did without wanting to put a name to their city play. For example, in the early nineties I noticed that the door to the tower of St. Brides Church just off Fleet Street was often left unlocked and took to going up to enjoy the view – I believe at the time it was also possible to pay to be guided up the tower but I preferred to go on my own and for free. One day I mentioned that I’d been accessing the St Brides tower to Iain Sinclair and he decided that he and Chris Petit should film me and a few others going up there for a TV special they were making entitled The Falconer. Sinclair and Petit’s on-the-fly filming (we didn’t ask permission) must have alerted the church authorities to my ongoing but unauthorised use of their tower, and rather than being left open as it had been before, when I tried to access it in the later nineties I found it locked.

I also used to (and sometimes still do) use what Bradley calls infiltration tactics just because I wanted to see inside a building but I didn’t consider what I was doing UE or anything else, I just saw myself as having a laugh. For example, in early 1995 I was in San Francisco and happened to find myself walking past the city’s Masonic HQ. I walked inside and told the guy on the desk I’d come all the way from London and wanted to see the building. He asked me a few questions and having got the impression I was a mason (I wasn’t), gave me a tour. This was spontaneous and unplanned but it was the sort of thing I did (and my friends did) pretty frequently.

Back in the day I’d also do what Bradley calls ‘edgework’ but this didn’t necessarily involve trespass, which seems so essential to the self-defined UE scene. For example, in April 1985 I went to Belfast and walked from there to Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland. I left Belfast in the afternoon and arrived at a border control post manned by British soldiers on the far side of Newry around 4am in the morning. This was at the height of The Troubles and as I approached them the squaddies at the checkpoint pointed their rifles at me and told me to stop. They demanded to know what I was doing and when I told them in my London accent I was walking to the Republic they freaked. “You can’t go there,” one of the soldiers screeched as he pointed at the twelve or so miles between his border checkpoint and the Republic, “that’s bandit country! You’re English, you’ll be killed.” By this time the squaddies had lowered their rifles, so I just walked past them while saying: “Don’t worry mate, I’m not running around waving a gun about or dressed in combat gear, so no one is gonna be bothered by me.” I just walked calmly into ‘bandit country’ and on to Dundalk, from where I hitched a lift to Dublin. I did know there was a risk of being tortured or shot crossing the UK/Eire border in the way I did in 1985 (since all sides would be suspicious of me), but it was worth it to see the look on the squaddies’ faces when I went through their checkpoint.

I’m not sure if it is the fault of Bradley as an academic ‘researcher’ or a reflection of a more general flaw in whole self-defined UE scene, but despite the title Explore Everything, this book actually represents a narrowing down and flattening out of urban experiences and play. If Bradley is to be taken at face value then too much in UE is about reportage (often of a visual nature in the form of film and photography) – whereas I just used to (and still sometimes do) engage in similar activities but without bothering to record them at all. Also because both those I hung with and still hang with attach no particular labels to their walking and climbing and trespassing activities (aside from in the past perhaps ‘psychogeography’ – but that’s also a label many who used to use it would now reject because of its absorption into British literary culture), these were and are far broader in range than what Bradley describes as UE. Despite my many reservations about Explore Everything, the seventy odd pages that make up the ‘Grails of the Underground’ section are worth reading because – among other things – within them the author begins to break free of the academic mind blocks that so fog both his thinking and ability to fully experience the city as he flails hopelessly with various issues elsewhere in the book.

[Tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

I dislike book reviews that trash a book because it's not the book the reviewer wishes it was, but I'm going to do just that. There's excitement, passion, and adventure in Explore Everything...in small nuggets. Unfortunately, these nuggets are embedded in a dense matrix of "academic speak" that, to me, felt preachy, pretentious and boring.

The book I wish this was? The urban exploration equivalent of Roger Brucker and Richard Watson's The Longest Cave, a classic true-life adventure story about the struggle to connect the extensive Flint Ridge cave system with nearby Mammoth Cave. Thrills, drama, history, folklore, humor--all come together here. And, you'll walk away with a far better picture of the lives, motives, and character of the idiosyncratic folk who participated in fifty-plus years of Kentucky cave exploration than in any academic treatise.

>end rant<

[Julieanne Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought Explore Everything-Place Hacking the City by Bradley L. Garret as a gift for my 16-year-old son but it was me who ended up reading it. My kid relishes urban ruins and moody photography, capturing municipal life on film with typical teenage angst. Another son has a passion for history and classical architecture, ancient and contemporary. My older sons have previously hacked cityscapes, exasperating motorists via downhill longboarding, parkour, trespass, traveling the world as a freegan busker and various other anarchist breaches in tunnels, caves and disused buildings. This has been challenging to me as a parent. Place hacking reframes these activities as morally essential. It seems to be a rite of passage for young males to go where they are not allowed- finding the sub cultural cracks and fissures in daily life and exploiting them. I only have myself to blame because I wanted them to question things, to be different and to go further than one is traditionally allowed to, hitherto to identify with people’s heroes, be civically engaged and to aim for social vindication. This attitude is described as ‘edgework’ in the book and it is the place where the creative self begins. Or self-destruction. It’s up to you.
The concept of ‘place hacking’ allows the reader to breach boundaries such as the London Tube vicariously through the exploits of Bradley L. Garret et al. The use of pseudonyms and group identity gives anonymity to geographer-cum-adventurers self-styled as the London Consolidation Crew (LCC) who scale shining towers, breach dark boundaries and explore subterranean depths in urban spaces all over the western world. Written by a balaclava clad academic, the style is oddly conservative and scholarly. He never quite succeeds in escaping the disciplined style of a researcher despite his subversive undertakings but he will inspire a generation of young males more relevantly than Bear Grylls ever has. Instead of formulas and models for survival the book encourages artistic resistance and rebellion, in order to survive and live, rather than to submit to the public order.
The author takes participation to the highest limits gaining access where it is not freely given and overcoming the suffocating apathy city life promotes. In this process the anthropologist has crossed the boundary line and created a new reality, becoming a representative and leading a movement. I have a new sympathy for taggers and graffiti artists. Garret unwittingly becomes a voice for disenfranchised urban youth, except unlike my sons he enjoys the privilege of a doctoral degree. This hasn’t prevented him from being handcuffed or behind bars. He quotes anthropologists Coleman and Golub who say “Hacking is a constant arms race between those with the knowledge and power to erect barriers and those with equal power, knowledge and especially desire to disarm them”. Today’s kids are overly constrained by neoliberal economic structures and Garret bears witness to the wreckage. By being grounded in the harsh reality of the city Garret shows he is aware and alive, appealing to an awakened consciousness in the reader.
Garret sees himself as an anthropologist, embedded in groups of city hacking pioneers such as the LCC and ‘Team B’ and reporting back on new vistas in the style of an abstract professor. He is overly analytical and psychologically reflective but this does add thoughtfulness. He is not there to change anything, to challenge elites or to steal but he emerges as a thought leader anyway as he moves beyond the public commons to invade privately owned or inaccessible areas. He neither trusts the police, nor private security and refuses to obey the limits of city spaces. He revisions the way we see the city. He appeals to a sense of freedom. This book explores the pushing of sociological boundaries just because you can. And you should.
As a former urban geography student one of my favourite forms of governmental architecture is the post war British style called Brutalism and when I travel I always search for its uncomfortable raw concrete bunker look to catch a photo so this work was always going to appeal to me personally. There is no frivolity or lightness with impenetrable security in places such as downtown Chicago and Garret breaks down barriers subversively in a quest for personal discovery. It becomes an addiction, requiring deeper risk and adrenalin surges. Ownership is gained through atmospheric photography and hyper-testosterone driven claims on urban exploration websites. A posting online is simultaneously the equivalent of obsessively adding to a collector’s hoard and placing a flag on a new frontier. Competition is driven by new exploits, new heights and depths and ultimately the personal knowledge that such risk taking enables. This personal knowledge is a vehicle for introducing philosophy to the reader. In spite of being fully present in the wastelands of Detroit Garret’s book is nether anti-capitalist or traditionally left leaning. It is strangely postmodern. He explores the power differentials between the city canopy and sewers. In one sense he colonises places, creates new tangible histories and in another he democratically reclaims them. Philosophically he is supposedly neutral towards urban systems, and the art of just being and accepting what is, rather than preserving or conserving values is emphasised. The author has no intention of creating museums of these places but their greyscale, paint peeling, concrete blocky remnants are noticeably thought-provoking. For Garret, the photography is memorial enough.
Old hospitals, asylums and disused industrial sites present themselves for brave exploitation and yet the book is largely introspective. One wonders if Garret is there to simply conquer himself. Place hacking is an enquiry into existentialism. It observes, and brings the explorer into the dynamism of now, acknowledging the past but letting it go. It brings into question why we code these spaces as impermissible and why we criminalise people for simply being there. On one level the author coaxes us into allowing monuments such as under-city tunnels, sewers and empty factories to crumble but on the other hand he demonstrates their worth. Some places such as Parisian tunnels are ancient and some in Las Vegas and Los Angeles are in the process of being built, therefore the reader is juxtaposed between the past and the present as if time folds over on itself. The style of the book is acutely academic, seasoned with anecdotes and narratives of adventure, history, male camaraderie, and quest. It will appeal to those of us who want to steal our communities back from authoritarian institutions, to enhance creativity and narratives in city life yet are disaffected and challenged by the flow, scale and boundaries our spaces create. I do hope my youngest son does eventually read this exceptional book, it is a primer for refusers and incorrigible idealists.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

The modern city is a sanitised area nowadays, with draconian restrictions on the places that you are allowed to go. Garrett is a place hacker, one of those urban explorers who try to reach the absolute limits of where they can go, be it underground or to the very top of the new skyscrapers that pierce the sky.

In this book he decries the places that he has reached in London, from the disused tube stations, the Royal Mail underground systems and the brick victorian sewers to the very top of the Shard before it was completed. A night walk across the Forth Rail bridge is another highlight. He describes the thrill of reaching somewhere that the authorities would rather that you didn't go to. He visits America and travels up some very high buildings from Detroit to LA.

As part of the London Consolidation Crew, one of the groups of urban explorers in London, they gained a reputation as being one of the groups who managed to get to a lot of the unexplored parts of the city. After a few brushes with the law they disbanded, and their position has been taken by other crews. With his current position as a researcher into heritage and the urban environment he is well placed to consider the cultural aspects of his exploration, and he talks about that the way he has been treated in the UK compared to the US.

All throughout the book are photos from the places that he has visited. There are pictures of decay in the eaten block building that he has been to, and some amazing photos from tunnels and the mothballed tube stations that he accessed. But the best photos by far are those taken from the top of these buildings that show the modern city at night with the lights from the traffic and buildings adding a surreal and ethereal quality as well as showing the views that so very few people see. Was well worth reading.

[Edward Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a teen, I spent a lot of time doing things like this but never to the extent of what Garrett and the crews he was documenting did. At this point, I am surprised I don't have asbestosis. To "hack" is a colloquial term used to reference people in places that others are forbidden to access; be they sewer lines, underground (subway) tunnels, and abandon locations. They also speak of "plain clothes" hacks where they access some of these locations in broad daylight under the noses of the people who were "supposed" to be there.

Photos, maps, and detailed tales of the hacks are amazing and well worth the read as the book is very short and shows not only how awesome the events could be but also speaks to the lawbreaking consequences and possible disease and illnesses involved in such.

4.5 of 5 because I really wanted more info about the US sites, even if they were just a slight bit beyond the 1/2 chapter we get in the book.

[Jay Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really love this book - it works on many levels:
1. An exhilarating first-person account of 3-4 years exploring London and beyond, all ingenious plans, dizzying heights, run-ins with security and general jaw-dropping derring do. Brad tells a yarn with panache and wears his emotions on his sleeve - the excitement, the fear, the come-down: we get it all.
2. An ethnography of an urban exploration crew: how it formed, grew, defined itself against other groups, became closer-knit through shared experience adversity, and schismed. Anthropologically it's particularly interesting for being about as participatory as "participant observation" can get. A reflexive meta-analysis of the ethical quandaries this throws up is in there, but lightly worn - this is the mass-market book, not the PhD thesis itself.
3. An argument for the 'right to the city', a kind of guerilla spatial democracy. 'Explore Everything' is political in how it expands the scope of the possible - and perhaps reminds the reader how normatively constrained our urban movement is.

So - a fascinating book, well-written, lots of great photos (shame they're uncaptioned though) and leaving you with a whole lotta things to think about the next time you enter the tube, or walk past a building site in the City of London. Highly recommended.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every single researcher in the humanities and social sciences should read this book. Every member of an ethics committee should read this book. Everyone thinking about the boundaries, limitations and borders of knowledge should read this book.

Garrett investigates - and indeed participates in - the urban explorer 'movement.' The il/legality of their behaviours and practices tests the limits of ethnography and 'ethical' research. The frame of the book - where it starts and ends - is the researcher being arrested by British police. The intermediate chapters offer powerful examples of 'place hacking' and probe the uncomfortable and unusual (and often discarded) spaces of the city.

Besides being useful for urban researchers and ethnographers, this is a book of its time. Garrett states, "I am not the first researcher to have a brush with the law, but it’s interesting to note that it seems to be becoming more frequent as the regulatory regimes of neoliberalism creep into the academy.” He shows that - when working at the limits of knowledge - institutional challenges will emerge. But so will powerful and gutsy new knowledge.

[Ichor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Explore Everything is the culmination of several years of ethnographic research conducted by Bradley Garrett while embedded with urban exploration groups.

Garrett starts his journey as an urbex peon struggling to gain access to the community. By the end of the book he’s an established member of the London Consolidation Crew, an infamous infiltration crew whose notorious conquests include the Kingsway Telephone Exchange and the London Post Office Railway.

Urbex appears a relatively recent phenomenon thanks to increased media interest, but Explore Everything highlights the rich historical backdrop of the present incarnation. Garrett offers historical examples from the Australian Cave Clan in the 1980s and the Night Climbers of Cambridge in the 1930s to John Hollingshead and Félix Nadar who explored the sewers of London and the Catacombs of Paris respectively in the 19th century.

The book introduces theoretical frameworks to explain the appeal of urbex to its practitioners and the ever growing popular audience, drawing on theorists as diverse as Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre and George Herbert Mead. The most interesting is Garrett’s invocation of the concept of “edgework”, which was born out Stephen Lyng’s work on the sociology of risk-taking. The term was coined by Hunter S. Thompson to describe his own gonzo journalism.

Garrett deploys the concept to explain the desire to urbex:

[Edgework is] a blanket term for any activity undertaken by someone who actively seeks experiences that involve an abnormal potential for personal injury or death […] a negotiation between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, sanity and insanity.

Explore Everything is lavishly illustrated with photographs of Garrett’s explores and is far and away the most comprehensive academic examination of the global phenomena of urban exploration.

[Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is interesting stuff here. The first-hand accounts of exploring skyscrapers and the London Underground are genuinely exciting to read. Some of the photographs are spectacular.

The manifesto element of the work is important, and the claim that real engagement with our urban environment is increasingly being locked down by private landlords and the authorities has validity. He arguably pushes it too far, because, for example, the London Underground is never going to allow people to wander about on its train tracks because of the actual danger. But I think it's undeniable that the range of activities that we are allowed to do - and are allowed to even think about doing - is diminishing over time.

Unfortunately, it is an overwhelmingly smug and self-satisfied read.

The author clearly believes himself as a member of a secret elite, distinguished not only by personal bravery but by access to some enlightening gnosis which the muggles will not comprehend. This leads to some fairly obnoxious and untrue statements about how all "normal people" never look around or think about their cities.

But it also leads to a lot of unintended bathos. Many of the photographs accompanying the tales of derring-do are of abandoned buildings and construction sites of a very mundane kind, which pretty much everyone has experience with. It's like someone telling you they've seen El Dorodo, only to present you with grainy camera-phone shots of the wasteland behind the rail depot on the edge of town.

Other anecdotes read like nothing more than "Man, I went to this amazing party in a squat!", which aren't interesting to anyone who isn't a stoned undergraduate. The verbatim conversations between different members of the 'Urban Exploration Community' are mostly this sort of problematic.

The most smug and self-satisfied thing is that the author describes his own period of 'exploring everything' as the "Golden Age of Urban Exploration". Like all such claims made throughout human history, this is extremely doubtful.

[Oriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm just recycling my own reviews I guess, but I already described this book in my "want to read" review of this other one. I said how this is about a group of urban explorers in the UK sneaking into and photographing abandoned buildings and disused subway stations and giant under-construction skyscrapers, but written first as this guy's PhD thesis relating urban exploration to the modern and postmodern condition, and our relationships to space and time, and our ownership or lack thereof of our public places and our private place in the world. It's pretty great, even though it took me a million hours to copyedit, on top of my day job, and so ruined my life for a couple of weeks. It's kind of sad that I was stuck in my apartment night after night, reading about these really daring crazy trespass exploits.

Moral of the story: the life of a copyeditor is just not as glamorous as the life of an urban explorer. I know you're all shocked.

[specialagentCK · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the language is lovely, the photographs are beautiful, and the stories are fascinating. On the other hand, some of the writing smacks of condescension and pretension, and many of the people described in the book (including the author) seem more than a little self-indulgent to me. I also had a hard time overlooking the many typos (was there no editor??) and some of the contradictions inherent in the author's message. Despite all this, I did ultimately enjoy the book because I agree that there are many spaces that should be more easily available to the "average" person, and that people should be able to decide for themselves what risks are worth taking.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some great pictures, and a lot of twaddle

Self-absorbed and self-congratulatory to the point of being almost masturbatory.

Solipsism and a generally collectivist world view and a strong stream of typical academic navel-gazing (climbing a rope into an empty tunnel does not “shockingly reconfigure the space”) makes this one incredibly dreary reading.

But man, those pictures. And lemme be clear: this dude was *serious* about his research, and unless he’s just lying (which I don’t believe he is), showed amazing physical courage in some tight and dark places.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Our generation has come to realize that you can’t buy real experiences, you have to make them. Experiences like these are what quality of life is about. It has far less to do with how much stuff you own and more to do with how you choose to spend your time.”

After watching the Joe Rogan’s episode 1515 with Dr Bradley Garrett, I found myself fascinated with the topic of urban exploration (UE), partially due to my fascination with the verticality that the City of London offers, but also due to my attraction to the nostalgia that UE offers, as I spent a decent part of my high school years exploring the abandoned hotel up in Gananoque as well as the old asylum in Kingston. As such, I picked up a copy of “Explore Everything” seeking to learn more about this clandestine world and the community within in.

Within “Explore Everything”, Garrett takes readers on a journey through the cities we inhabit (or once did) from a completely different perspective. In providing an immersive experience, Garrett speaks to the forgotten spaces of society, exploring what is found within them. However, he does this through a compelling narrative of a subculture that seeks to reclaim what we may have lost in a metaphorical sense concerning our right to access, which therefore outlines the risk and rewards of a craft that is within the grey area between appropriate and illicit.

I found one of the strengths of “Explore Everything” in the sense that it does provide an academic background, mostly considering that Garrett wrote the book as part of his doctoral research. He found the best way to do so was to integrate within one of the teams itself, which has subsequently allowed him to offer thoughtful examination of the culture and political significance of UE. In challenging the notions of private property, urban development policies, and the boundaries of public space, Garrett offers insight into the complex relationship between a city and its citizens, especially in considering how authorities have seemed to repress our ability to express creative energy in public, uncontrolled spaces in the last few decades.

This being said, “Explore Everything” certainly does see Garrett (and the larger UE community) grapple with the implications and ethics of trespassing as well as documenting what can be considered sensitive material considering its forbidden access status. Conversely, he also raises the question regarding the impact of exploration on the preservation of historical sites and of a city’s collective memory. All this to say, this is not a book only speaking to the activity of UE itself, and readers should be aware of the inherent bias to some of the statements made by the author.

In sum, as Garrett underlines, Sartre said, “freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you”. To this effect, these urban explorers have chosen to push the boundaries of what is possible, both physically in terms of what can be reached and socially in terms of what should be considered acceptable. To this effect, “Explore Everything” is certainly a captivating exploration of such an endeavor, with Garrett’s passion for the topic incredibly evident within the storytelling itself. I would highly recommend “Explore Everything” for my curious peers looking to learn about the hidden spaces beneath the surface of our cities. Further, it is also recommended for those looking for introspective reflection on what society’s infrastructure represents, and where we fit amidst it.

[Mad Medico · Rating 3 out of 5]

Explore Everything contains a lot of good material but broadly suffers from its author wearing two hats at once. The book's structure is derived from the author's journey into the UrbEx scene, from a newbie to Team B initiate to the co-founder of the LCC, who end up shifting from ruin exploration to the more hardcore espionage-type exploration cracking into skyscrapers, building sites and sewer and rail systems, earning them brushes with the 'respectable' community, the law and the media, in that order. The pacey, well-written passages recounting LCC's missions are interspersed with Garrett philosophising on the subjects of alternative place-making, neoliberal surveillance culture, and edgework (a catch-all term describing al forms of hacking and rule-breaking in the urban space, from UrbEx to graffiti to illegal raves). Garrett's personal involvement in the community limits the scope of the book, which fleetingly discusses the roots of the modern UrbEx scene and other forms of 'place-hacking' which often seemed more interesting to me than the often-times smug, macho trendies dicking around in hacked lifts; furthermore, I'm sceptical of some of the claims he makes: the link between UrbEx and the Situationists is very tenuous considering that the majority of explorers eschew politics and fit the mould of dumb pleasure-seekers much more snugly than that of revolutionaries (and I doubt that most of them are at all familiar with Guy Debord). The intellectual passages can be tedious, and Garrett's quoting of seemingly endless theorists gets old when the same points about the meld and the past and present being blurred are made - the points regarding the shift of the public space into private hands following the adoption of neoliberalism and the Victorian interest in the sewers as bearers of societal progress (before they were associated with sickness, and viewed as fissure points between arbitrarily defined borders of sanitary and unsuitable locales, being forgotten and suppressed) were interesting and salient, though. Ultimately I wanted either a more focussed and rigorous study of the full history and lineages of UrbEx and edgework, or a no-nonsense account of the author's involvement in the scene - trying both ended up harming the book. As an addendum, I feel that Garrett was probably reticent to properly critique the subculture (its insularity, hypocrisy and lack of political ambition) due to his personal involvement and friendship with many scene members, not wishing to sell them out, which is fully understandable, yet also reveals another weakness of attempting both a personal account and academic study. Oh well.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this immensely and enjoyed the stories of urban exploration in London, Paris, and the US. I loved the section in Las Vegas, particularly when I found that one of the entrances to the subterranean level of the city is just under a hotel I had stayed at in March just gone.

As an academic volume, I found the book less satisfying. While I am sympathetic to the idea of exploration as resistance to an extent and find the idea of democratising public space compelling, I found that the researcher was a little too close to the researched. Garrett obviously adores the UE scene, and while he is at pains to explain that any attempt to portray it as an organisation resists easy definition and characterisation, he clearly became a big part of whatever 'it' is, in London at least. This makes for fascinating reading, but less objective rigour. While the author makes some reference to some of the critical literature on UE, I wanted to see more robust engagement with it. Furthermore, while a passing mention is made of to the 'male-ness' of UE, I wanted to see more engagement with gender. The names of notable people in the UE scene are reeled off, as if they are all friends (some clearly are). I wanted to find out a little bit more about the people involved, their motivations and backgrounds. Although the author states he came to feel uncomfortable with unwittingly becoming the mouthpiece of the pursuit, there is also quite a lot of ego on display.

I would recommend for the stories, the fantastic photography, and some of the commentary. For a more nuanced approach to UE, I will look elsewhere.

[Anne Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I foud this book fascinating in many ways - the topic ... groups of people doing illegal and often risky/ dangerous things for kicks based around buildings, all over the world. I have heard of people doing this, especially in underground tunnels , but this was much more than tunnels. the chapters ranged from derelict buildings (both British mental hospitals post-Care in the Community legislation and former Soviet Union factories, hotels and other spaces) to underground zones i had never heartd of before - like the "mail rail" - a deep set of tunnels (much deeper than the tube lines) under London that enabled Royal Mail to transport post across London. Then building projects being undertaken now, or empty tower blocks - the most interesting thing about these was the incredible photos of explorers standing 'on top of the world' on parapets and crane arms overlooking cities rather than things revealed from the buildings themselves.
The biggest sense of disatisfaction came from the very repetitive 'philosophy' angle - why young people do these things, who they are, the struggles, jealousy and competitiveness between the 'clubs/clans/gangs'(??). I dont understand why this needed to be re-iterated so many times, perhaps because this book was produced as part of a PHD study by the author.

[William Yip · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected based on the title and description. Tedious, repetitive, convoluted, and, at times, superficial philosophical navel-gazing took up a significant portion of the content. The author tried to elevate the practice of urban exploration, saying it lets people fully experience life in the city as well as time itself and create long-lasting memories more than everyday life when any activity lets people do all that. Governments are doing their jobs in being worried about people trespassing into areas that deliver services to countless people because even an accident could cause serious damage. There were also missing words.

That said, the author included beautiful pictures of the places he and his colleagues explored throughout the book which do show what can be experienced through UE. I greatly enjoyed the descriptions of his travels. I do think governments shouldn't care about UE done in areas that don't affect many people.

[Levi Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of this book felt like a rambling academic exposition instead of an artistic telling. It could have been more succinct, and I wish it focused greater effort on the story, history and tactics of urban exploration.
The first 2/3rds (or so) of the book are a garbled treatise that tries too hard to give a forced, often muddled meaning to the acts of urban exploration. The last third of the book was much better, and actually relayed meaning simply through the telling of story--which is what stories are for. Nearly all of the aforementioned academic expounding is summarized much more efficiently and succinctly in the epilogue of the book--making it seem like hundreds of pages were added merely for length instead of substance. The pictures are cool, the overarching theme is cool--I only wish the entire book had been written like the last part, and not tried so hard to explain how meaningful their actions were--instead merely showing us through great storytelling.

[jedbird · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5*

I read this for a reading challenge that asked for a travel memoir, and this is certainly a kind of travelogue. The author was embedded with a London urbex crew for a few years and participated in various explorations (derelict, corporate, utility) over that time. This book seems to be at least a version of his ethnographic doctoral thesis.

This is about urban exploration, and while numerous urbex events in Europe and the US are described, it's mostly made up of scholarly talk about liminality, access, curiosity, and the politics of space. This gets a bit repetitive, and the author makes his points many, many times over, but they're good points.

[Jan Schaller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ein sehr spannendes Buch über eine Londoner Urban Exploration Group, die in den Jahren zunächst klassisch verlassene Orte entdeckt hat und dann dazu übergegangen ist, noch aktive oder besonders geschützte Orte zu knacken (Hoteldächer, Kanalisationen, U-Bahn-Schächte etc.). Das Buch ist natürlich immer dann besonders stark, wenn es von diesen Ausflügen erzählt, es ist aber auch interessant die sozialwissenschaftlichen Reflexionen zu lesen oder wie sich die Gruppe entwickelt hat. Ebenfalls sehr spannend war zu lesen, wie der britische Staat bzw. die Londoner Polizei darauf reagiert hat: mit harter Repression. Durchaus sehr lesenswert und inspirierend.

[Kitzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the read. Being someone very concerned about social expectations and waiting for approval, this story opened my eyes to a new kind of freedom. It questions boundaries created by those in power and the possibilty of dealing with them on our own terms. Exciting, academic, reflective. If you're into thrillers it's not your book, but if you love cities and rebels and want to look critically at inhabiting urban spaces: do yourself a favour and give the book a try.

[Matthew McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gripping and highly readable investigation of how we interpret, imagine and interact with the spectacle of urban space under neoliberalism. Garrett's text is a must-read for anyone interested in ethnography of the "urban exploration" subculture and the cultural geography of the city. Anyone who enjoyed China Miéville's The City and the City- which Garrett references at points - should check out this book.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit more academic than I was expecting, but enjoyable read. The most interesting part for me was when they encountered homeless people living in the tunnels under Vegas and briefly talked about their lives... how they got there, living there by choice, etc. I'd be interested to hear more stories about the Vegas tunnel-dwellers.

[Christophe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Half of the book is anecdotes of urban exploration adventures, some of which are pretty jaw-dropping to read, including entering an abandoned Russian nuclear submarine: * * * * *

The other half is academic mumbo-jumbo: *

Altogether: * * *

[Demetzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much enjoyed as someone more interested in urban decay rather than high or underground expo it was still interesting to read about and some cool photos

[Aaron McLoughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philosophically speaking Explore Everything asks us to consider freedom; to ask questions, explore and know who we are and where we come from.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty cool. Would like to check this one out again, actually. A window into a whole parallel world.

[Joe Beeson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun read, wish there were more stories of the exploration, little less about the philosophy

[Frank Hoeppel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly unique

A sociology thesis, travel guide, and misfit ethos peppered with truly jaw-dropping photos. This book, while not for everyone, was compelling and affecting.

[Eden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to get pickled and climb a building after reading this