Deserted Finland

Greeting My Godson Part III

The following location was completely new for me despite having grown up and lived most of my childhood just some kilometers from it. And I found it thanks to my friend and I getting a bit lost in translation.

My family spoke Finnish, but I went to school in Swedish all the way from kindergarten to the end of the secondary school. Thanks to this history I am fully bilingual. As I studied in Finnish and have made my career in the Finnish speaking media, that is generally the language I am using on my social media. I however have some Swedish speaking friends, with whom I interact in Swedish.

The previous summer I had once again tried to explore an abandoned brickworks without much success and complained about my brickworks curse on my social media. My Swedish speaking friend linked me a location on the map. I was a bit surprised because it wasn’t a brickworks.

Brickworks in Finnish is ‘Tiilitehdas’, which directly translates into ‘brick factory’. The word can mean both a brickworks and a factory made of bricks, which was definitely the case with this location.

It was a former sawmill built in 1910. It saw its greatest years in the 1950’s, when it was heavily expanded. In the 1970’s the Finnish forest industry started changing focus from sawmills to pulp mills, and smaller sawmills started to close.

This sawmill’s fate was sealed in January 1980, when a 110 meter long lumber packing building burned down. The fire remained a mystery until March, when some local guy entered the local police station and confessed. He had been waiting for a ride in the area, gotten the great idea of igniting some thrash in the break room of the building and the rest is history.

The building was rebuilt, but the sawmill never became profitable again. It was closed down and was abandoned. Some of the buildings have since been occupied by boat service and storage companies.

The first buildings. According to a newspaper article this was a woodworking workshop built in the 1950’s. There are some residential buildings behind.

Although the building was in a pretty bad shape, it was also well locked meaning, that it was a no go.

Another part of the complex. According to the same article these are the remains of a factory, which produced mechanical pulp.

One end of the building featured this fairly large, round structure. Everything was in a very bad condition.

This was by far the most interesting building on the lot.

The large pipe connected it to the workshop.

One section of the building had completely collapsed.

One end of the supposed workshop building was an open wooden shed. It contained old boats.

A look from the shed to the collapsed section of the larger building. There was a way in, but it was too dangerous. There was ice, rotten wood, nails and sharp metal everywhere.

Another look at where the wooden shed connects with the workshop.

And another to the collapsed section, where there were stairs leading down to a dark basement.

We decided to explore the shed, where there wasn’t much to be seen. Just some more locked doors.

And a look to the other direction. The floor was a bit rotten and the roof seemed to be leaking. A perfect spot to store a boat, especially a wooden one.

We finally managed to enter the round part of the building, which looked like some sort of a silo. It was only connected to the rest of the building with a pipe and featured tiled walls.

I really have no explanation to what this could have been. This also doesn’t count as an entry.

I thought I could smell oil.

Our final hope: to find a point of entry to the workshop through the barrack.

A sign by the last company running the sawmill.

Important phone numbers updated last in the early 1980’s.

Different uses of wood.

The traditional lost shoes. But no way inside the factory. Doesn’t count as an entry.

A massive concrete bunker by the seashore. If I remember correctly, this thing had something to do with drying the wood entering the process. The article has vanished from the internet.

In the early 2010’s the area was rezoned. The brick made factory buildings received protection status. Nothing more to see here this time. But definitely a place to keep an eye on in the future.

Greeting My Godson Part II

After the child caring institution we decided to try the old dockyard, which we had unsuccessfully tried to enter the previous summer. The gates were still locked, but as the sea was still frozen, we figured that we could walk to the area from the ice.

And how right we were. Now there’s nothing between us and the last remaining part of the dockyard.

I remember the scary area from way back in 1996 when I was still a kid. And now I’m here for the first time.

Dangerous? I doubt that.

The concrete structures were majestic.

Moving on deeper inside.

It was a bit difficult to determine, where the roof and walls were supposed to be open and where they weren’t. That opening doesn’t seem like intentional, though.

It’s a bit difficult to see what the text has originally said. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

A rather large switchboard is still on the wall, mostly broken.

An even larger switchboard, also mostly broken.

There were still some large cranes in the hall.

But that was about all the equipment there was.

A small office. This area had once been accessible from an office wing on the other side of the wall. As that wing now was demolished, the little cubicle was useless.

The dock hall seen towards the sea.

Stairs leading nowhere. This was where the office wing used to be.

Even other buildings from the lot had recently been demolished. The hall was the last one standing.

This was where the offices had stood.

Time to walk towards the sea again.

And probably say goodbye to this majestic structure.

Later in 2023 the town announced an idea competition, where they promised to sell the buildings for one euro to the party, who presented the best concept. They only got one idea – a company wanted to turn the ruin into a live music club.

The town said the idea wasn’t good enough. They cited noise issues and the company’s lack of funds as reasons why the idea was impossible. Instead they decided to demolish it all. Just last week the authorities deemed the structure so dangerous, that they ordered it to be immediately demolished.

So by the time I return to my home town the next time, all this will probably be gone.

Greeting My Godson Part I

Like every Easter I travelled back to the town I was born in to spend some quality time with my godson. It’s already a tradition.

And an equal tradition is, that during one of the days I and the godson’s father escape somewhere to do urban exploration.

Here we are just a few hundred meters from one of my old childhood homes. And this place is famous in town.

It was built in the 1850’s and was originally the main building of a farm. It was enlarged again in the 1890’s. It’s one of the oldest remaining buildings in town.

In the 1900’s it has been a public school, a rehabilitation center for mentally disabled and most recently a child caring institution. This institution is known by everybody in the town and kids who ended up here were disliked and feared back in my youth.

The building has been unused since 1999, and the town has made attempts to have it demolished. Yet it stands.

We never expected to gain an entry, but I really wanted to document the place for once.

It really was large for a wooden building.

Just as I expected. No way in.

When Architecture Meets Greediness

For one reason or another, I’ve grown very fond of architect Martti Heikura’s buildings. Heikura, along with Uki Heikkinen has been a very influential figure in determining how the city of Oulu, my former home town looks like nowadays.

Sadly, several of Heikura’s buildings have been featured in this blog previously. They include the Pajarinkulma and its neighbour Rautakaupankulma demolished in 2013, the old vocational school dormitory demolished in 2019 and the old primary school of Haukipudas demolished in 2022.

In the heart of Oulu was one of Heikura’s most majestic works, the old mercantile academy, which also featured the hall of the city orchestra. The building later became the school for kindergarten teachers and after that the school of music teachers.

In 2013 the music teacher school moved to the main campus of the university, and the old mercantile academy was left abandoned. The owner of the university’s buildings teamed up with a local construction company to do something with the area.

The redevelopment plans became public for the first time in 2018. They suggested demolishing the regionally valuable school building with a 9-storey block of flats.

Every single authority from the museum authorities to the regional government said, that this shouldn’t be done. Yet the city council approved the plan in early 2023. It was the ugliest political theatre, which I have ever seen. Several members held speeches, where they said, that this shouldn’t happen. Then they voted for it.

The company owning the old school was the same, which had allowed me access to the school for children with special needs back in 2013. They had hinted, that it would be possible for me to photograph this location, but after I started writing several articles about the need to protect it (I was working at the local newspaper at that time), I sort of figured out, that I was no longer welcome.

I had to do what I could. Go out there and document the place.

It was impossible to photograph the school in one picture, as it was sitting tightly between new blocks of flats, a high school and a historically important area of small, wooden houses.

The back of the lower wing.

A better view of the lower wing. This was where the city orchestra once performed.

The lower wing seen from the seaside.

The hexagonal windows were a distinct feature of late 1940’s and early 1950’s buildings.

The seaside end of the building. There were alternative plans to convert the building into apartments, but the company owning it said,that it couldn’t be done without damaging the values of the building. My question is, what damages the values more: the modification or the demolition of the building. And the politicians bought this nonsense.

The back of the building facing the old wooden houses. The high school is visible in the lower right corner of the photo.

A vertical photo showing better, where they want to build their 9 storeys to.

The building seen from the yard of the high school.

And finally the yard. No entry, as I had expected. The building had been abandoned for almost 10 years, and there had never been one.

I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. My friend set me up with a group of architecture students, who wanted to appeal about the detail plan allowing the demolition of the building. I wanted to do that too, but couldn’t as I no longer lived in Oulu.

The result was, that we wrote an application together. I was their ghost writer, they were the official applicants. We knew, that this would take time, so we submitted it and waited.

I’ll Warm Up The Sauna Part II

So we are finally inside. Moving on to the first apartment and its thrashed kitchen.

The rooms were small, dull, dark and built with cheap materials.

This was also the story with the bathrooms.

The second room of the first apartment. This one was for two people to share. I started my career in the university of applied sciences in a very similar apartment, but I rented it in full. One of the two identical rooms was my bedroom and the other one my living room.

Moving up the stairs with this extremely beautiful photo, which I took by accident. The grey, graffiti colored building on the other side of the block appears as a mosaic through the holes in the stairway wall.

Traces of birds on the stairs.

The balcony on the second floor.

Another apartment coming up. They were really numbered this technically even in my dorm.

And another kitchen. Pretty much identical to the previous one, just very much more intact.

A room in this apartment.

And another room in the same apartment. Again, identical to the previous one. This was how they were built.

Another view of the courtyard.

And another kitchen.

The door to the dorm room had a mark on it.

Still, the room was the same.

So welcome to another kitchen. This one is the mirror image of the previous one.

Another apartment room.

And another one. This time there was even furniture left.

A window towards the courtyard.

And another messed up door to a new balcony.

Which looks exactly like this.

There were several warnings about how dangerous life in this block of flats can be.

We cut the exploration short this time. It was getting so dark, that no great photos could be taken. The block of flats was also so homogenous, that this kind of photos were about the thing we were about to get from it.

So we just quit exploring, went to the sauna and had a very interesting talk.

On December 27th, 2022 after another great season, the best so far, I ended my 221st exploration inside an abandoned building. And yet while I’m writing this, I’m above 500. This shit is about to get real.

And in the next post we will start season 2023 together. It had its pros. And cons.

The buildings in question were bought by a real estate developer back in the autumn of 2023 and demolished shortly later.

I’ll Warm Up The Sauna Part I

The summer was well gone. I had transported my summer car to the summer storage, broken up with my summer date, had spent the Christmas and was feeling tired and miserable as usual during the winter.

I had learned about an area of nine abandoned blocks of shared flats, which had sat abandoned since 2020, when their ownership was changed from the student housing association to the city of Espoo. The reason? The buildings were built in the late 1970’s, were in need of excessive renovations and were located in a place where the rent of the renovated apartments would never match their demand.

As demolition was approaching, I was eager to go to the location to photograph. But during the winters I am usually so tired and inactive and unwilling to face the cold and darkness, that the main effort I do to leave my home is to go to work and to buy cheap red wine to fuel my photo editing and post writing.

A day after Christmas a musician friend of mine asked, if whe should spend the evening bathing in their sauna and hanging out. I was hesitant at first saying, that I should probably spend a rare occasion of going out to catch these blocks of flats.

‘Yeah, you should. You can see them from my balcony’, they said.

This offer was too good to refuse. I went to their place, we ate together, turned the sauna stove on and crossed the road to explore.

I am usually very fond of preserving old buildings. The moment I saw these cubes made me think, that demolition would probably be a favour for everyone.

Some of the buildings were already pretty badly vandalized and fences had been erected to deny access.

Large pieces of graffiti filled several of the windows.

Even several entrances had been covered with plywood.

There was even a former bar next to the buildings.

More similar buildings by the next street.

The courtyard. The buildings didn’t have stairways inside. Instead the apartments were entered through big balconies inside the block.

Another building.

And yet another. Fences were present here, too.

They seemed pretty tight. But time to see how to get around them.

By the way, this is what 3pm in Finland looks like in late December. In the North it’s already pretty dark.

The open courtyard of the block seen through the fences.

A much better look without any fences. Unfortunately this is no breakthrough, just a photo through the bars.

The facade of yet another building.

More fences, more stairways and balconies.

But finally a way past the obstacles.

And finally the classic of every abandoned house: a lonely shoe.

An Autumn Date Part VII

The night was already falling. After exploring the abandoned summer camp, we headed to the old dairy processing plant, which has been my biggest urbex dream since 2011. That was eleven years before this photograph.

Despite having recently received large graffitis on the windows, all doors were shut. And the dream remains. The day I manage to enter this place I can retire.

My date drove me to the nearest railway station and I headed home. Unfortunately our relations took a turn to the worse during the autumn and we haven’t seen eachother since late November that year. But it was a nice summer together.

The summer is ending, it’s time to store my summer car for the winter and wait for the following spring when I get it out again.

But I did manage one more exploration in 2022.